TDB Issue 1 2024

THE DIGITAL BANKER

A W IS A S RD U S E

SINGAPORE FINTECH FESTIVAL 2023

Exclusive Interviews with Citi, HSBC, SWIFT, Amazon and more

INTERVIEW WITH ROEL LOUWHOFF

Chief Transformation, Technology & Operations Officer, Standard Chartered Bank

EXCLUSIVE PODCASTS Sustainability Series and Digital Innovation Series

BILL WINTERS

CEO OF THE YEAR

20 24 ISSUE 1

UPCOMING AWARDS Submissions Deadline:

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15 DECEMBER 2023 29 FEBRUARY 2024

27 MARCH 2024 6 JUNE 2024

2 FEBRUARY 2024 25 APRIL 2024

12 APRIL 2024

27 JUNE 2024

28 JUNE 2024

5 SEPTEMBER 2024

12 JULY 2024

19 SEPTEMBER 2024

9 FEBRUARY 2024 2 MAY 2024

24 MAY 2024

1 AUGUST 2024

2 AUGUST 2024

24 OCTOBER 2024

29 FEBRUARY 2024 23 MAY 2024

7 JUNE 2024

22 AUGUST 2024

16 AUGUST 2024

7 NOVEMBER 2024

Organised by:

SCAN HERE TO KNOW MORE

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FOREWORD As we enter 2024 the global banking industry continues to have to grapple with stubbornly persistent economic headwinds, increased operating and regulatory uncertainties as well as lingering geo-political risks. Despite the sobering outlook, financial institutions have remained focused on delivering better outcomes for customers and are championing innovation through key technology investments underpinning digital transformation.

A case in point is Standard Chartered Bank, who through its Group Chief Executive, Bill Winters, featured in this edition of The Digital Banker magazine as our “CEO of the Year” in 2023 has proven to be instrumental in orchestrating the Bank’s revival. Aside from delivering on Standard Chartered Bank’s five strategic actions the Bank has been quite effective in leveraging its network, digital and sustainability capabilities to drive much needed long-term institutional resiliency.

Likewise, through our various award programs, concluding in the last quarter of 2023, we have been able to document key institutional achievements across geographies showcasing various unique initiatives to secure competitive advantage and unlock value for clients. Importantly, banks are developing unique platforms that are helping customers secure new opportunities for wealth creation and asset growth. The industry itself remains a very customer-centric and relationship focused business and the personalised solutions being delivered consistently across all touchpoints are undoubtedly essential for sustained engagements.

Similarly, humanising financial services has become equally critical given the persistent cost of living crisis that has weakened both customer and business sentiment at large. In particular, holistic solutions that address the financial well-being of customers and promote more responsible borrowing are welcome initiatives to restore some measure of client confidence. Moreover, the push for optimising data & analytics and incorporating AI/Gen-AI does raise more possibilities for business transformation and reshaping digital interactions with customers although ethical design considerations remain that must be appropriately addressed.

Finally, innovation continues to leave its mark on the industry as we discovered during our sideline interviews and conversations with key decision makers at the Singapore Fintech Festival held in November, 2023. For instance, the use cases for Purpose Bound Money (PBM) remain an intriguing concept that clearly has potential but balancing security needs and ease of use will likely influence its adoption.

Having said that the real challenge on any transformation journey is in ensuring that operational processes and practices are streamlined on an end-to-end basis and are not merely window-dressing exercises applied to client-facing functions.

Certainly, 2024 holds with it great promise for all players but a more circumspect approach would not be entirely unwarranted to maintain an upward growth trajectory.

Nirav Patel Managing Director & Editor

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Table Of

Contents 06

BMO transforms Client call centre engagement through AI

18

Mashreq’s digital transformation spurs financial success

32

Exclusive Interview: SHOBHIT MAINI Co-Head of Digital Assets, Global Markets, Citi

46

LH Bank Makes Waves in Thailand with Novel Profita Investment App

58

Why SCB TechX’s ISO Gateway project will bring big changes to bank transactions

71

EastWest puts employees at the heart of its business

84

RAKBANK’s Digital Journey from Skiply, the educational mobile app platform, to Quick Apply for SMEs

97

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Altana Wealth: consistently outperforming through innovative and niche investment strategies

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HSBC Canada: Campaigns for Diwali and MidAutumn festivals bring big bang results

20

Exclusive Interview: SUJIT MISRA Director, Amazon APAC Payments, Amazon

34

Metaco transforms global digital asset infrastructure through Harmonize™

48

Standard Chartered Hong Kong: Unlocking the future of banking

60

UOB puts ESG strategy and digital expertise front and centre

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86

99

AFFIN BANK’s President & Group CEO steer the Group to greater heights with a three-pronged approach How Mashreq Al Islami Reshapes Islamic Banking in UAE

Exclusive Interview: JOEL LANGE Executive Vice President and General Manager, Dow Jones Risk & Research

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Standard Chartered: Disrupting the structured products and API worlds

21

OCBC Bank: Pioneering the future of banking with innovative excellence

36

Open API, Open Opportunities: Comarch’s Blueprint for SME Banking Excellence

50

62

Exclusive Interview: SHIRISH WADIVKAR Global Head, Wholesale Payments & Trade Strategy, Swift Exclusive Interview: GABRIEL LAZARO Senior Vice President, Head of Digital for Overseas General Insurance, Chubb

76

The Golden Standard: Moody’s and the Future of Compliance

88

Stanbic IBTC: Pioneering innovation in transaction banking and cocreating with clients

102

Orchestrating Financial Excellence: FAB’s Transformative Approach to Banking Solutions

5

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Bill Winters delivers deftly steering Standard Chartered Bank during period of uncertainty

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Exclusive Interview: DONALD MACDONALD Head, Group Data Office, OCBC

38

Exclusive Interview: TOH SU MEI CEO, ANEXT Bank

52

Standard Chartered Malaysia’s SmartStocks breaks equity investment barriers

64

UOB takes standards control up a notch with Project Honeycomb

78

Miles ahead: UOB’s unique debit card soars on KrisFlyer partnership

90

Best Cash Management Solution Provider in Taiwan

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The Digital Banker Podcasts

27

TMBThanachart harmonizes human touch with digitalisation for unique client experience

41

Standard Chartered Singapore scales new heights with its digitalplus-people strategy

54

Philippines’ MSMEs thrive on UnionBank’s support

66

UOB connects retail banking prowess with regional ambitions for big success

80

How Thought Machine’s Vault Core is Transforming Digital Banking

91

Efigence: The Power of UX Design Driven

by Customer-Centric Approach

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Exclusive Interview: TEMISAN OFONG Global Head of Customer Channels, Commercial Banking, HSBC

30

How HSBC Hong Kong remains a credit card and wealth leader

44

ServiceNow’s Vision: Creating a More Connected, Agile Banking World

56

Arttha Propels Digital Lending across Emerging Markets

68

Exclusive Interview: MILA BEDRENETS Chief Growth Hacker, Tonik

82

Pegasystems and the New Era in Client Lifecycle Management

94

Exclusive Interview: ROEL LOUWHOFF Chief Transformation, Technology & Operations Officer, Standard Chartered Bank

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BMO transforms Client call centre engagement through AI An initiative by BMO to improve customer experience and optimize efficiency is a proven winner. Recognized with the ‘Outstanding Machine Learning Initiative’ Award at the recent Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards, the project solution is the embodiment of BMO’s purpose to Boldy Grow the Good, and create a digital first bank.

Analytics and business experts came together across the bank, working in an agile fashion to innovate and analyze customer calls using cutting-edge AI. The innovative AI-based solution uses linguistic patterns to analyze customer call transcripts and natural language processing (NLP) to identify customer pain points and assess front agent compliance requirements.

“This is the power of analytics at work, and is a testament to our best-in-class analytics capability at BMO. We know the answers are in the data and we leverage data as a strategic business driver to help customers make real financial progress every day” said Lori Bieda, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, North American Personal and Business Bank.

Launched in 2022, the solution enables call categorisation and call driver identification, across all major products and services. It also offers

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monitoring to verify that call centre agents make required disclosures and obtain client consent prior to providing customers with the desired product or service. This is a win for customers and simplifies the process for the employees that serve them.

DRIVING INNOVATION TO STREAMLINE BUSINESS PRACTICES AND ENHANCE CALL CENTRE MANAGEMENT This hybrid model of rule –based and supervised NLP, permits both accurate labelling and customisation to specific call drivers, while maintaining transparency, interpretability and fine-turning needed for nuanced categorisation. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) augments semantic understanding and contextual similarity, driving accuracy in call categorisation capabilities.

NLP models efficiently categorize calls into distinct

buckets with precision levels reaching between 70-90% across categories. This resulted in close to 300,000 calls migrated from call centres to digital channels per year meaning customers are able to self-serve, and agent time is freed up to help customers make real financial progress and offer advice.

AUGMENTING PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS TO ELEVATE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND GENERATE REVENUE To ensure rapid and accurate execution of policy, AI was used to analyze all transcripts between agents and customers, and pinpoint opportunities for improved customer communication. The blend of technology and human intervention was leveraged to put guardrails and oversight in place so managers could review generated insights, validate outputs and determine if any follow-up action is needed.

Presently, the automated solution has the power to analyze 400x more calls than previous manual control measures while providing a better, more accurate experience.

AI is core to our bank strategy and at use across our business driving tangible outcomes every day. This is a powerful example of how we are transforming experiences and balancing the best of technology and human intelligence to transform customer and colleague experiences.”

Sandip Sahota Enterprise Chief Data and Analytics Officer, BMO.

The initiative‘s positive impact on both customer experience and operational efficiency results in an estimated annual business benefit of CAD $6.5 million. This is a a true marker of BMO’s commitment to smart solutions that enable real financial progress at scale. This solution – now in place across seven lines of business - is poised to transform the customer experience within and across channels.

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HSBC Canada: Campaigns for Diwali and Mid-Autumn festivals bring big bang results HSBC Canada has seen remarkable achievements in leveraging its global and strong Asian roots to bring a unique set of initiatives for clients in Canada – initiatives that go a long way in building out and retaining an important customer base.

As one of the world’s largest banking and financial services group, HSBC knows how best to position itself to capture opportunities in different markets.

It’s the same case in Canada too, where HSBC has been serving both Canadian and global customers for over 40 years, leveraging its scale and international banking expertise to serve the local market.

Digitalization of the banking experience has played a big role in building that global connectivity. HSBC Canada is a leader in that, and rightly took the Best Digital Banking Sales Initiative award in the 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards hosted by The Digital Banker.

The winning project is the bank’s Guaranteed

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Investment Certificate/Term Deposit campaign linked with the mid-Autumn and Diwali festivals, effectively providing customers with a secure investment option during a period of market uncertainty, enabling them to realize better returns amid higher interest rates.

The focus on these two festivals makes sense. The Mid-Autumn festival is one of the most important Chinese festivals (falling in early September in 2022), while Diwali is India’s biggest and most important holiday every year, falling in late October 2022. HSBC’s wealth and personal banking customer base in Canada has a high penetration of Chinese and South Asian clients, inspiring HSBC Canada to incorporate the two festivals into its 2022 Q3/Q4 strategy for GIC/term deposits.

UNIQUE TECHNIQUE GICs and term deposits are Canadian investments that offer a guaranteed rate of return over a fixed period of time. While the returns are lower due to its lower risk profile, its appeal got a boost due to market volatility and the higher interest rate environment in Canada and globally.

The highly integrated campaign was launched in four languages, featured three main offers, and honoured important cultural moments for the Chinese and South Asian customer segments. HSBC Canada’s offers also surpassed that of peers given it matched the highest 4.5% interest rate offered by the Royal Bank of Canada for one- and two-year GICs. The results were excellent. The campaign exceeded targets, with digital gross sales growing a whopping 1,159% year-on-year and HSBC seeing a 1,560% year-on-year spike in the digital opening of new GIC/ term deposit accounts. The campaign also accounted for 21% of the bank’s 2022 digital gross sales – making for an impressive feat.

app – adding to the existing English and French offerings in the country – becoming the first global HSBC entity to offer a single app in four languages.

This created a more inclusive and personalized experience for Chinese-speaking customers, allowing HSBC to acquire and retain this segment in line with its strategic goals.

This is certainly important. Roughly 30% of HSBC Canada’s customer base speaks Cantonese or Mandarin. Of those who are not actively using digital channels, 25% are Chinese speaking.

Rolling out this project additionally demonstrated the kind of success that can be achieved through collaboration. The turnaround time for the initiative was just four months, but it required intense collaboration between the business and technical teams across Canada, as well as an exemplary development approach, providing HSBC’s global teams with a template for scaled market language translation activities.

LANGUAGE OPTIONS

In the first quarter of 2023, over 12% of log-ons to the HSBC Canada app were in a Chinese language – laying the foundation for the development of a range of Chinese language in-app features.

HSBC Canada also got the Highly Acclaimed nod for Mobile Banking Initiative. This recognition was because HSBC Canada introduced traditional and simplified Chinese language versions of the banking

The awards are certainly warranted and reflect the way HSBC has used its global and Asian footprint to provide a novel localised approach to customers in Canada.

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Standard Chartered: Disrupting the structured products and API worlds Alson Ho

Head, Wealth Management, Hong Kong Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) Limited

Innovation in a world of data overload and growing competition in financial circles is the need of the hour. So is simplifying complex processes and information to enable financial professionals to focus on what truly matters: their clients. Standard Chartered Bank has recognised these dynamics and has been shaking things up.

Standard Chartered Bank is an innovator. No where is that clearer than in structured products, where the bank has played a leading role in transforming the market landscape through a range of pioneering features.

for retail professional investors, the bank started to offer fully automated pricing, term sheet and risk disclosure documents generation, real-time pre-trade credit checks and an end-to-end straight-throughprocessing platform in early 2023.

That transformation is visible across many markets.

In China, for example, Standard Chartered’s clients enjoy 24/7 service on mobile and internet banking to price and subscribe to equity-linked structured deposits, usually within a span of five minutes.

Thanks to that fast pace and ease of execution, over 99% of the bank’s structured products volumes in China are done on mobile.

By simplifying administrative tasks and reducing wealth managers’ workload, Standard Chartered’s automated platform empowers its experts to offer advice and product ideations to clients more swiftly and consistently. What differentiates the bank as a result is its dedication to equipping relationship managers with the tools they need to focus on clients and wealth planning.

It’s a similarly strong story in Hong Kong, where Standard Chartered’s role as a disruptor continues to make waves. In the city’s structured products market

This is a win-win for both clients and the bank.

Clients are able to seize market opportunities swiftly and with more confidence, while Standard Chartered

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STAYING ON ITS TOES

needed to automate other future structured products like structured deposits. It also makes Standard Chartered ready to roll out these products in the Greater Bay Area through the Wealth Connect scheme, when the authorities expand the suite of products to include structured notes.

The bank is already reaping the benefits of this forward-thinking approach and putting its clients first.

It is clear that Standard Chartered is ready to roll – laying the foundation for more growth and innovation.

is able to ride on this to further grow its reach among Hong Kong’s professional structured product investors.

In the first quarter of 2023, Standard Chartered Hong Kong recorded a staggering 400% year-onyear jump in the number of tranches traded by professional investors in structured notes in its retail business, and an impressive 600% rise in related revenue in the same time frame.

600% rise in related revenue in the same time frame.

Its proposition for retail structured product clients is certainly unrivalled. Taking an unbiased advice approach, Standard Chartered gives it clients full transparency as it neither uses proprietary sell-side type research nor in-house products. Instead, it adopts an open source approach to both advice and solutions – something that appeals to investors.

This structured note offering for professional investors is just one part of the Standard Chartered banking puzzle. Along with the other pieces – around foreign exchange digital offering, mutual funds and bancassurance – the bank’s clients have fully automated end-to-end products right at their fingertips.

To acknowldege its myriad strengths, The Digital Banker recognised Standard Chartered with the award for the Best Structured Product Platform (Hong Kong) at its 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards.

This is only the beginning. Given Standard Chartered’s retail structured product capability is the first of its kind in Hong Kong, it provides a template and a solution for a similar expansion in its other markets across different types of structured products.

Additionally, the growth in assets under management within structured notes for professional investors arms the bank with the critical infrastructure

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BREAKING NEW GROUND Standard Chartered bagged several other awards, too. The Digital Banker named it the 2023 Best Digital Bank – Brunei, the Best Equity Trading Platform in Malaysia, the Best RPA Initiative in the Middle East, and the Best API Initiative in Singapore.

The Singapore accolade for best application programming interface is particularly note worthy.

APIs are critical for financial institutions as they help them develop applications quickly, in response to customer trends and behaviour. Given the growing need for data and connectivity and the rapid advancements in data aggregation technologies, financial institutions and fintech firms in Singapore have long been collaborating on using open APIs more securely. This means there is more data sharing between the two groups of players – without human intervention – with more advancements in API set to transform traditional banking even further.

Standard Chartered is a leader in the wealth API space with an initiative called Olympus, a stateof-the-art project that establishes a common API layer to accelerate digitisation of end-to-end wealth management products and services, built in-house and unveiled in December 2022.

Olympus focuses on two main things. First, to enhance client experience by providing market leading digital capabilities, like instant portfolio creation and account opening for a seamless digital onboarding journey.

The second is to significantly boost speed-tomarket – which is possible as API capabilities built once can be customised and are reusable across functions. For example, an API initially built for fund orders placed by a client can be easily adapted to handle both fixed income and equity orders with very little configuration.

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Thanks to Olympus, Standard Chartered’s speed-to-market has improved by roughly 60%, while its

cost of interfacing and integration has fallen by about 70%.

ACCOLADES GALORE Standard Chartered has outdone itself with Olympus.

The main selling point of the Olympus API platform is that it’s a standard, omnichannel integration point which houses reusable APIs, enabling real time integration with different systems and channels.

As an additional bonus, the platform is built on highly scalable infrastructure that can cater to any on-demand digital processing across the entire suite of wealth management transactions offered by Standard Chartered.

Without a doubt, client experience has got a major fillip at a time when financial institutions across the board are pulling out all the stops to sway

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customers with savvy digital tools. Through wealth APIs, Standard Chartered’s clients can execute endto-end digital funds processing with zero manual touch, check their portfolio performance instantly, and have a real-time leverage eligibility check when placing an order. The API’s other capabilities include instant order fee enquiry and validation, and the ability to create, view, amend and terminate regular investments and savings plans.

The API initiative’s success is impressive. But Standard Chartered’s bankers are not resting on their laurels. They are looking ahead, plotting on how best to capitalise on the opportunities in the space.

The Olympus API layer continues to boost its functional capabilities or the API library, with the eventual aim to have 100% reliance on real-time and on-demand APIs, eschewing point-to-point or batch interfaces unless for regulatory reasons.

Standard Chartered’s awards and ambitions underscore its commitment to innovation and efficiency when serving clients. They also reflect the bank’s commitment to pushing the boundaries in the world of finance and being a first mover wherever possible.

Bill Winters delivers deftly steering Standard Chartered Bank during period of uncertainty

As part of its annual Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards program (under its People & Employee Awards stream), The Digital Banker conducts an extensive assessment of leaders across the retail banking landscape. It is intended to recognise those individuals that are making unique contributions to their respective institutions, while championing ground breaking initiatives that are having a material impact in terms of overall retail finance performance.

Importantly, The Digital Banker assessed a number of senior executives with a proven and wellestablished track record of delivering results and empowering their teams to grow, thrive and evolve as needed in response to changing market dynamics and wider strategic shifts. Clearly, these achievements are demonstrated through the leadership capability, organisational strength and corporate strategy in place backed by measurable outcomes.

Indeed, in this year’s edition, The Digital Banker is pleased to recognise Bill Winters, Group Chief Executive, Standard Chartered Bank as “CEO of the Year” as a testament to his remarkable orchestration of a truly reenergised Bank buoyed by purpose and momentum, by spearheading multi-faceted growth and accelerating institutional innovation across all lines of business under his remit.

STRONG AND EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE DEFINES A CHALLENGING YEAR AT THE HELM Winters assumed his role at Standard Chartered Bank (SC) as Group Chief Executive in June, 2015, following a distinguishing career in banking & finance spanning three decades. Importantly, under his leadership in 2022, SC delivered an impressive performance with income exceeding $16 billion, the highest since 2014 and a 15% increase.1 With the Group realising key objectives as laid out in its five strategic actions namely:  Driving improved returns in Corporate, Commercial & Institutional Banking (CCIB)  Transforming profitability through productivity in Consumer Private & Business Banking (CPBB)  Seizing the opportunity in China with the ambition to double onshore and offshore profit before tax  Creating operational leverage and delivering gross cost savings of $1.3 billion  Delivering over $5 billion of capital returns to shareholders Furthermore, Winters ensured that SC remained

1. Source: Standard Chartered Annual Report 2022 13

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extremely disciplined in managing costs, while leveraging underlying business growth and a favourable interest rate environment to secure $4.8 billion in profit before tax, marking a 15% year-onyear increase. The Bank also recorded an 8% Return on Tangible Equity (RoTE) with plans to attain double digit figures in 2023.2 Risks stemming from lingering inflation, economic slowdown in key markets such as China and a rising interest rates have had a marginal impact on the Bank’s loan portfolio and asset quality although exposure to China commercial real estate remains an ongoing concern.

In addition, through strategic partnerships with other multinationals, fintech companies, startups and government agencies, SC has leveraged technology to drive innovation and enable new digital platforms and ecosystems to facilitate successful customer journeys and/or operational enhancements. Similarly, the continued penetration of its two digital-only propositions in the Hong Kong and Singapore markets, through Mox and Trust Bank respectively, continues to achieve new milestones in elevating digital customer experience and driving client acquisition.

Focusing on the CPBB segment, SC realised gross savings of $233 million against the 2024 target of $500 million crediting branch network rationalisation, process re-engineering initiatives, headcount efficiencies and productivity gains through automation. Moreover, the CPBB costto-income ratio improved by 5% to 69% as cost control efforts deliver as intended, despite the market headwinds confronted by the Bank’s wealth management business.3

On the sustainability front SC remains on track to reach net-zero targets within its operations by 2025 while working towards its financed emissions goals by 2050. With a sustainability team in place the Bank has made requisite investments in programs and capabilities, targeting a $300 billion in sustainable financing by 2030, guided by a Green and Sustainable Product Framework and Transition Finance Framework.4 Commendably, Winters is deeply engaged in driving the climate finance agenda and chairs the Net Zero Banking Alliance representing Standard Chartered Bank.

CHAMPIONING NETWORK, DIGITAL AND SUSTAINABILITY CAPABILITIES TO DRIVE INSTITUTIONAL RESILIENCY Moreover, positioning the Bank as a bridge in connecting the world’s most dynamic markets and making requisite investments in digital capabilities and sustainability, Winters has led the team from the front in capturing new opportunities for the business and unlocking value for all stakeholders.

Given increasing South-South cooperation and intraemerging market trade and investment corridors, SC can effectively support those flows via its unique geographic footprint.

2,3,4. Source: Standard Chartered Annual Report 2022 14

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Clearly, SC is on an upward growth trajectory across key dimensions and Winters credits these institutional achievements to his colleagues at SC observing that “every single member of the Bank plays a special role in contributing to our collective success. Through them we endeavour to bring new products and services to our customers across our footprint. Through them we are here for good.”

Indeed, the Bank remains poised to achieving its RoTE target of 10% given that it is reassuringly a highly liquid and well capitalised financial institution with a diversified deposit base.

PAT PATEL

SHAYAN HAZIR

MELISSA MOI

AZIZ PARVEZ

Executive Director Elevandi

Head of Sustainable Business, Corporate Sustainability Office UOB

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Chief Digital Officer, ASEAN HSBC

Head of Corporate Treasury Sales, Asia Pacific Global Transaction Services Bank of America

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW TEMISAN OFONG

Global Head of Customer Channels, Commercial Banking, HSBC

Our ambition is for Business Go to become an integral part of HSBC’s offerings which is now connected to other HSBC platforms such as HSBCnet to provide a seamless customer experience.

TDB: What is the thinking behind the launch of the new B2B Business Go digital platform by HSBC here in Singapore?

TO: Our clients played an important role in the creation of HSBC Business Go. We engaged 100+ senior executives, including CFOs and treasurers to provide feedbacks to us. We discovered that companies often struggle to find local market insights when expanding internationally. Information are housed in different websites or platforms making research time-consuming and cumbersome. Furthermore, businesses tend to have limited access to capital for overseas

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expansion, and are unaware of local grants and subsidies. Furthermore, businesses also found it challenging to gain access to service partners, local sales network and channel businesses. In another survey, more than 80% of respondents indicates their preference for a one-stop platform to support their business expansion. We also identified the need to work with knowledge contributors to gather a more comprehensive range of content for our clients. These insights have inspired us to take a step further to resolve our clients’ pain points by developing HSBC Business Go with International Navigator proposition embedded to the platform. This is how International Navigator came about and Singapore is the first to offer this unique platform where we tap on EY to offer tax and accounting-related content. This way, our clients will benefit from tapping on our banking capabilities to grow their business, and gain easy access to critical business knowledge, tips and build connections, which will help their companies grow further.

TDB: How has the market responded to earlier launches in Hong Kong, Malaysia and India and what have been the key learnings from those rollouts?

TO: We have launched HSBC Business Go first in Hong Kong back in 2020. As of Oct 2023, we have 139k+ members and 2,100+ business members signed up across Hong Kong, Malaysia and India with 9,800+ articles published and average of 150k monthly unique visitors captured between August and October 2023. The experience in previous rollouts have provided us with a better understanding of our clients’ interests in knowledge and access to network that will aid them on their international business expansion.

TDB: Importantly, how is the platform creating value for business owners particularly through its International Navigator feature and accounting software integration capabilities?

TO: The key feature of the International Navigator proposition is built around clients’ needs where we envisage the delivery of a seamless customer experience interface (UI) and journey ( UX) for their research on their expansion journey. The ease of search and filter criteria by countries and industries, coupled with our embedded algorithm will help push relevant articles and insights from both HSBC and EY to help them develop their expansion plan all within a single platform.

Through HSBC Business Go, our clients can gain access to a comprehensive library of thought leadership articles and updates on government schemes and policies to support overseas expansion. In-house content developed by HSBC such as the International Business Guides offer a wide range of local insights to help CFOs and business owners identify areas of opportunities.

Our knowledge contributors such as EY also contribute content to help our clients, more specifically CFOs and Treasurers to tackle issues related to corporate tax, personal tax, international tax, government incentives, foreign direct investment regulations and currency regulations related to overseas expansion. We also plan to form new partnerships with other business organisations to expand our suite of content, events and seminars dedicated to CFOs/ treasurers and other market practitioners to connect with each other.

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Through API integration, HSBC clients can set up bank-feed to the accounting software Xero via the HSBC Business Go platform.

With bank-feed, HSBC transactions are automatically directed to Xero, saving time and reducing errors in reconciliation. We will continue to evaluate adding more such software services providers to extend our offerings and help businesses streamline their expansion.

Here is some early feedback from our clients having tried out HSBC Business Go in Singapore: “It’s especially helpful that HSBC Business Go draws on the different market’s government, business, and trade platforms to provide a one-stop view of key information needed to aid us on our regional expansion journey. I found that tremendously valuable as it’s made it so much easier for us when we were setting up our business in Indonesia and Hong Kong.”

- Ms. Abigail Yu, Director, 3E Accounting Pte Ltd “The HSBC Business Go platform not only helps generate valuable business leads, but also contributes to the success of other small businesses. It’s a true win-win which is why we were excited to sign up as a member when we first heard of the platform.” – Ms. Reena Sharma, Director, Shandi Global Pte Ltd

TDB: What other markets are you looking to extend this service to and what new enhancements are being planned for in 2024?

TO: We are continuously reviewing our expansion opportunities in other markets within Asia. Supporting clients to capture international opportunities is always our mission. Our priority is to consider key Asian markets where our clients demonstrate a strong desire to expand their business overseas. Our ambition is for Business Go to become an integral part of HSBC’s offerings which is now connected to other HSBC platforms such as HSBCnet to provide a seamless customer experience. We will continue to evaluate adding more features including software services providers and knowledge partners to strengthen our capabilities and help businesses streamline their expansion journey.

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Mashreq’s digital transformation spurs financial success The banking industry is undergoing a seismic shift; the competitive landscape is no more restricted to other banks. Banks today compete with big tech firms, e-commerce providers, telecoms, and various other digital-first sectors.

Customers expect their banks to be always on, to follow them where they go and not the other way around. It is not enough just to have a digital banking offering.

It is imperative to have a customer-centric innovative culture consistently powering these digital banking initiatives. Mashreq’s rich history of innovations, its focus on being a digital disruptor and challenger bank, and consequently its early pivot towards introducing future-ready, customer-centric initiatives have enabled it to remain synonymous with excellence in banking.

Mashreq’s retail banking business is recognized by its customers, competitors and stakeholders as the best-in-class end-to-end customer experience provider in the sector across the entire region. The bank not only offers the full range of products and services to customers – from deposits, lending and wealth management to insurance, securities trading and other Shariah-compliant offerings – but has also enabled sustainable, profitable growth and enhanced financial returns for its shareholders.

The numbers tell a strong story. In 2022, revenues at Mashreq’s retail banking arm jumped by 45% from 2021 to AED 2.9bn, and deposits by an equally 18

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impressive 30% to AED 50bn. Net profits, meanwhile, more than doubled to AED 1bn.

Mashreq’s retail banking success is testament to its visionary and inspirational leadership. It is a reflection of its ability to harness the power of technology to offer access to a range of highly personalized banking solutions as well as innovative financial products and services – aimed at meeting customers’ personal and professional goals to Rise Every Day. Mashreq’s focus on expanding its pioneering digital banking platforms like NEO, NEOBIZ and NEO

PAY, have played a significant role in the bank’s remarkable growth. The firm’s push for digital leadership enabled its robust financial performance in 2022 and has propelled the rapid growth of its customer base. Building on its remarkable growth so far, it remains committed to prioritizing strategic initiatives, with digital transformation continuing to be its central focus.

EDGING OUT PEERS Mashreq has proven banking excellence on many fronts. It has invested heavily in digital innovation over the past few years, particularly in data analytics, artificial intelligence and the use of robotics to automate processes. The result of its inhouse ability to bring out new digital offerings and be a disrupter in the UAE’s financial segment has led to Mashreq seeing a record number of new clients onboarded in 2022.

Mashreq’s retail banking operations has two pillars: relationship banking and platform banking.

The relationship banking pillar emphasises providing clients with focused and specialised offerings, across the gamut of mass affluent, affluent, wealthy, high net worth, private banking and business banking group of clients. The platform banking pillar, meanwhile, works as the digital engine for the whole operation, focused on acquiring and servicing mass clients entirely digitally, as well as offering loans and enabling fund transfers through digital channels.

It is clear that Mashreq’s digital emphasis has always been a cornerstone of its growth strategy. In 2022, Mashreq’s retail banking arm unveiled a host of features to make banking even easier for clients.

These included biometric facial recognition-based instant onboarding of customers, digital personal loans, digital IPO leveraging, instant supplementary cards and in-app loyalty rewards redemption programmes. Mashreq additionally boasts the first-in-the-UAE insurance proposition called My Insurance Market, which allows users to access a whole host of insurance options online to cover their needs.

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WAY FORWARD

Mashreq’s efforts and leadership have produced exemplary results.

Its customer base soared by 30% in 2022, further validating the firm’s digital strategy.

It has also closed 80% of its bricks-and-mortar branches in the past five years,

while building a world-class digital operating model that includes a seamless onboarding experience, as well as the availability of a full range of products and services though digital channels – in yet another reflection of where the UAE’s retail banking market is headed.

Such impressive strides are reflected in its recent recognition as the ‘Best Retail Bank – United Arab Emirates’ at The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards.

Mashreq remains steadfast in its commitment to power digital-first, customer-centric innovations, to enable its expansion plans into new geographies within the Gulf Cooperation Council, in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

It also plans to double down on enhancing its cost-toincome ratio, safeguarding the business from future challenges, being a market leader with scalable tech architecture and growing further with agility, leaner operations and robust compliance systems. Given the numerous feathers already in Mashreq’s cap, such ambitions are likely well within reach.

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW SUJIT MISRA

Director, Amazon APAC Payments, Amazon

Purpose Bound Money (PBM) can foster an era of new technologies that enable modern, fast, and inexpensive payments.”

TDB: Given the already prevailing mass adoption of digital payments at least domestically within Singapore and reasonably banked population segment in the city-state, how would you define inclusivity through fintech? Are there remaining pockets of underserved segments and where are the opportunities?

SM:

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s a global company, inclusivity to us means A that our customers, regardless of where they live, have access to Amazon stores via a payment method of choice. In the spirit of customer choice and convenience, we’re always considering how the payments

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landscape is shifting for our customers in Singapore and what payment methods are gaining traction and relevancy so that we can make shopping on Amazon. sg as convenient and safe as possible. For example, in 2022, we introduced PayNow for Amazon.sg customers in Singapore and have seen good adoption, despite high card penetration in Singapore. When we think about ensuring access for our customers, our approach is shaped by the core belief that building payment inclusivity is the future of global commerce. While we operate at scale, we also know that payments is a local business. Across our global footprint of online stores and digital services in more than 35 countries, we accept over 30 forms of payment as part of our commitment to meeting the diverse needs of the communities we serve.

TDB: The Purpose Bound Money (PBM) concept enables senders to embed rules when making transfers in digital dollars.

Do you anticipate some hesitancy from users given the perceived restrictions imposed through programmability?

How can you build the required trust and confidence?

SM:

e are of the belief that programmability W has the potential to offer both customers and merchants efficient, effective and faster transactions. With any new payment method, ensuring that products and systems operate with strong data security, privacy and fraud mitigation is crucial to adoption, and these are aspects that are table stakes for us when we consider offering new payment methods for our customers.

Key to delivering products that meet these standards and strike a balance with offering an excellent customer experience, is partnership between private and public sectors in order to ensure security, access and a great customer experience exist simultaneously.

MAS and the banks, we hope to develop a mechanism for addressing merchant needs to improve payment terms and mitigate risks to cross-border trade financing. We also see potential for Purpose Bound Money to allow sellers to secure financing in a wider range of denominations and at lower cost to improve working capital, as fuel for their growth and expansion.

TDB: What are the observable benefits and value of using PBM in retail settings particularly in addressing gaps found within existing commercial voucher schemes?

SM:

BM can foster an era of new technologies P that enable modern, fast, and inexpensive payments. Programmability can facilitate both increased automation and accelerated innovation -- it already has the capability to automate manual processes, speed up funds settlement, and eliminate reconciliations.

Over time, it could result in lower costs and hence lower prices for consumers. To the extent it sparks innovation, it makes possible entirely new user experiences and merchant workflows. Right now, PBM is at a stage where merchants can play a decisive role in designing features that promote adoption and an overall customer journey that fosters trust and confidence in the programmable money system.

TDB: What other use cases do you see for PBM that Amazon is keen to explore and experiment with in enhancing current payment infrastructures?

SM:

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xpanding and deepening access to high E quality financial services for SMEs is an important part of our mental model for financial inclusion. By partnering with

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OCBC Bank: Pioneering the future of banking with innovative excellence In the banking industry, excellence is marked not just by financial performance, but also by a firm’s innovation, its commitment to customers and the way it is able to react to a rapidly changing business environment and, in turn, rapidly changing client behaviour. OCBC Bank sets a high standard by astutely marrying its digital prowess with expert advisory.

There’s no question that OCBC Bank is a trailblazer in the banking industry. After all, it’s the longest established Singapore bank, having been formed in 1932 from the merger of three local banks – the oldest of which dated back to 1912 – and among the most comprehensive consumer banks in the region, not just by geographic reach but also its product offerings.

That’s why OCBC Bank received four accolades in The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards: Best Multicurrency Account, Best Open Banking Initiative and Outstanding Omnichannel Integration by a Retail Bank, alongside a Highly Acclaimed nod for the Mortgage Product of the Year.

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MULTICURRENCY ACCOUNT CREDENTIALS Being digital is at the heart of OCBC’s business, and something it has capitalised on over the years through the OCBC Digital mobile banking app.

The app has one of the most comprehensive suites of wealth products to cater to the specific needs of each customer. For instance, it allows clients to trade equities through 15 exchanges and provides a shelf of insurance and investment products to choose from.

With a pick-up in travel since the world’s reopening from the Covid-19 pandemic, OCBC has also spotted a growing need among clients for foreign currency exchange.

To cater to that, it rolled out 24/7 access to instant foreign exchange services on the app, across 10 major currencies. Additionally, customers can opt to set up rate alerts, in order to be notified in real time when a preferred rate for specific currency pairs are met or set up auto-execute orders, so they don’t miss out on any opportunities– making OCBC one of just a handful of firms to offer such features for customers.

SPOT-ON OMNICHANNEL INTEGRATION OCBC has done a remarkable job at meeting the needs of different kinds of clients – the technologically savvy ones that prefer to be armed with do-it-yourself tools to plan their financial goals themselves, and those that seek out digital solutions as well as face-to-face advisory options for their financial planning journey.

OCBC Life Goals was thereby created in 2016 – with omnichannel capabilities launched in October 2018 – to shift the types of conversations OCBC’s bankers were having with clients, from being product focused to offering customised solutions in line with their long-term life goals.

Leveraging on the Singapore Financial Data Exchange (SGFinDex), this feature got a further fillip in recent years through the incorporation of data from other financial institutions including banks and government agencies, so customers have a better view of their overall finances when planning their future.

OPEN BANKING BOON A standout feature of the way OCBC operates is its focus on democratising financial planning by making it holistic, personalised and simple.

The solution? OCBC Financial OneView, launched within the OCBC Digital app after more than

500 hours of customer experience lab sessions.

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It has done so by leveraging open banking architecture and data from SGFinDex, Singapore’s version of open banking led by the central bank.

OCBC Financial OneView integrates various financial planning tools and features to allow customers to embark on their tailor-made financial planning journey seamlessly. This was a major success among Singapore’s diaspora, with the bank taking it up a notch in 2022 by integrating customers’ insurance data so that they can track their insurance policies and pay premiums easily.

MORTGAGE SUCCESS OCBC’s Digital Mortgage Suite deserves kudos for the experience it brings users. It features mortgage advisory, loan application, loan acceptance and loan servicing – all of which can now be done digitally.

Such features are a culmination of constant innovation happening at OCBC. For instance, OCBC started accepting and approving digital home loan applications from March 2020. The following year, it rolled out the market’s first retail sustainable financing product, Eco-Care Home Loan.

In 2022, it extended the digital experience to loan servicing, eliminating paper applications entirely.

Thanks to that, more than 30,000 - requests, including repricing, prepayments and loan redemptions, were handled by the portal within the first six months of launch.

OCBC’s vision of digital experience also extended to external stakeholders in the mortgage ecosystem.

By end 2022, OCBC also availed digital take-up of Group Mortgage Insurance whereby this option can be selected during the loan acceptance journey. The proposal form is generated upfront for customers and information transmitted on the same day to the insurance provider.

This kind of a forward-thinking approach makes OCBC a clear banking leader with a proposition that is hard to beat.

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW DONALD MACDONALD

Head, Group Data Office, OCBC

Good data is the lifeblood of good analytics and you cannot do good analytics without that foundation layer in place.”

TDB: Please share with us the importance of OCBC becoming a data-driven organisation for all its stakeholders and the challenges faced across this journey.

DD: We deal with a lot of data in the bank and many things we do in the bank is based on data and using it to make the right decisions.

Which customers do we onboard into the bank? Who do we lend money to with what interest rate? Do we charge them? Which transactions do we approve? What offers do we give to a customer? Data is really critical for OCBC to compete, whether that’s helping the business managers make better decisions or embedding AI into the key processes.

Banks, in many ways, are largely undifferentiated. We see data as a lever that we can pull to differentiate us. For example, developing products that are the

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most relevant to our customers’ needs or using data to give them the best experience.

Personalising the experience, the offers and the interaction they have when they deal with OCBC is important. Protecting customers from fraud and being able to detect scams in a timely manner is another key area where we can differentiate ourselves.

Likewise, using data to ensure that our employees have a good experience, where processes are streamlined and powered by data, is advantageous. Employees feel that they are working on something meaningful, and they can be productive, which adds significant value and plays a big role in differentiating OCBC from other peer banks.

We want our employees to believe that we are more efficient because data is helping them perform their roles.

OCBC did not complete its data journey overnight. We have been on our data journey for over 20 years now. Banks are rather complex organisations with many different systems and integrating those systems into one central platform takes some time.

Furthermore, we are unlike digital banks with just one channel. We have internet, mobile banking, ATMs, branches, relationship managers, contact centre and chat bots, making that seven different touch points.

The other challenge is on the people side.

Banks historically have not been seen

as a place with advanced data analytics and were not perceived as a destination where the top data talent would want to go, compared to the Big Tech firms. It took some effort to reposition OCBC to attract the best talent, and now people know that we have a modern data stack coupled with an advanced team working on interesting use cases.

TDB: What steps has OCBC taken in ensuring the maintenance of high-quality data, which is both secure and accessible for generating deeper business insights, and form a basis for advanced analytics?

DD:

ood data is the lifeblood of good analytics G and you cannot do good analytics without that foundation layer in place. OCBC was the first bank in Asia to invest in analytics and we had our first data warehouse in place back in 1998. Today over 300 different systems feed into our centralised data platform, and many of those systems are coming in real time. We have more than 900,000 different columns that feed into our database and with access to over 40 billion transactions.

What it takes to get there, it takes time. To do the good analytics, we have what we call the ‘Triple-A’ framework. Data needs to be available, accessible and accurate before you can do any analysis. In terms of data availability, we have 300 systems that feed into the data lake on a daily basis today and we do not process it in an ad hoc manner. We have a structured data strategy, which we review each year to assess the gaps in the data platform. Within my team, I am responsible for owning that data strategy, working with the business units to understand what we think the most critical data gaps are. I can proactively decide to bring in that data, if I think that data is going to be useful in the future.

We are systematically filling all the gaps in the database that we think might be important. Once the data is available, we then make it accessible to employees.

In addition, we have what we call preapproved access policies. This is where we look at all of the systems and for each system, we see what each team in the bank might need to allow them to do good analysis. Basically, we have built a preapproved access framework that allows people in OCBC to get access to the data that they need to do their job immediately.

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So rather than going through lengthy approval processes, we can centrally provide the required data. For example, if you join the risk analytics team, on the very first day, you can apply for access to data and you are granted access to all the systems that are relevant for your job.

There is an enterprise data catalogue that sits on top of the data platform where people can just query the type of data sought. We make data discoverable as well, which I think is a key thing when you have 900,000 different columns in the database.

Finally, how do we ensure it’s accurate?

Data governance is a huge focus area for a bank. We have a team which is focused on data governance. Every system has a data owner and we have automated data quality tracking and designated people responsible for resolving any data issue. That in a nutshell is how we effectively manage the data quality.

TDB: OCBC has recently announced the rollout of a Gen-AI based chatbot for the Bank’s 30,000 employees. What key productivity gains are you expecting to realise through its deployment?

DD: OCBC GPT is just one pillar of our Generative AI strategy. We have over 10 other applications that are already deployed in production. What has made generative AI famous is ChatGPT and so your strategy has to have something comparable to ChatGPT. OCBC GPT for us is effectively ChatGPT for employees. It is available within the secure OCBC environment. Fundamentally, we wanted to understand how we can harness the power of ChatGPT and bring it to an environment where we can manage what people are using it for to minimise the chance of data leakage. We also wanted to give them an interface where it is much easier for them to use it within their day-today job.

We started piloting OCBGPT back in May 2023, starting initially with 50 people and then expanding it as more people asked to get on board. By the time we finished the pilot we had over 1000 users. On average, employees were telling us that it was improving productivity by up to 50% in some of the job roles. It was being used for completing different tasks such as writing new job descriptions, responding to customer complaints, translating documents from Chinese to English, and summarising investment research reports etc.

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Employees reported that it had saved them up to 50% of their time and based on this, we were able to go to the senior management highlighting its productivity potential. We also managed to govern the information risks and were able to roll it out to all employees across the region.

We believe that these kinds of tools can transform the way that our employees work by taking away a lot of mundane, or ‘brain fatigue’ tasks. This enables employees to spend more time focusing on the things that really matter and areas where a human can truly add the most value.

TDB: What other use cases do you envision in leveraging Gen-AI across the Bank and how will this inform your data strategy going forward?

DD:

e think generative AI is about helping our W employees be more productive. It is about augmenting the employees so that we take away some of the mundane drudgery of work and they can focus on the higher value adding tasks. The way we think about it is that we are building the tools at two layers.

We are building a layer of what we call productivity assistants that help everyone in OCBC with the most common tasks like ideation, drafting content, translating content, turning the speech into text, and summarising documents etc. Those are capabilities that everyone in OCBC gets value from.

The second layer is on building role-specific co-pilots such as for the IT team, the contact centre team, the legal team and the compliance team, by looking at their specific processes and say, “what can I build for you that’s going to take away the specific drudge work that exists in your area.” An example of that is OCBC Wingman, the coding copilot we built for our IT colleagues. Basically, it plugs into our IT development environment and we can predict what the coders are doing and what they are trying to do next.

Impressively, Wingman automatically produces the code allowing our IT developers to be about 20% more effective when they are developing software. But it also has other use cases such as when I want to write documentation, when I want to do unit tests, when I want to debug the code, or when I want to refactor the code. All of that is automated with a simple click of a button, with Gen AI taking away those tasks.

The contact centre is another area where Gen AI can help. We are building a co-pilot for the contact centre agents where the 26

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copilot can listen to the calls and turn speech into text, while also summarising the call in 200 words and categorising it. Now we can automatically figure out the sentiment of the call and we can extract pertinent information from the call. Thereafter, we can share it with the customer relationship management team, relieving the contact centre agents of lower end data entry work and enabling the agent to pick up the next call faster.

We do similar things with compliance.

Before, the compliance team would have to listen to every call and transcribe it to try to identify any mis-selling. Now, using generative AI, 100% of the calls can be scanned and AI can highlight the call requiring further investigation.

TDB: How is OCBC embedding responsibility and ethics within its Gen-AI framework?

DD: When we talk about AI, we also have to ensure that the AI is built in a responsible manner. OCBC contributes to relevant industry forums including working with MAS to build the MAS FEAT Principles based on fairness, explainability, accountability and transparency in AI. Whenever we build models, we make sure that they adhere to the FEAT Principles.

We were one of the key partners with MAS on the Veritas initiative to develop testing algorithms for model Fairness. OCBC opensourced our own enhancements to the Veritas framework so that other people in the market could leverage our code and also augment their own capability. We have also collaborated with MAS on the project MindForge initiative, which is about ensuring Generative AI models are also deployed in a responsible manner. . Being able to understand what these models are doing is critical if we want to build trust in these capabilities.

Naturally, it is still an emerging area and even though it is early days, on our side we have already built our own evaluation framework. We can test using a library of 500 OCBC-specific questions to check if the model is accurate. Importantly, we are building these tools ahead of the market standards being implemented, although we do expect that probably in the next 12 months the market will also coalesce around some real standards, and then we will adopt those as they become available.

TMBThanachart harmonizes human touch with digitalisation for unique client experience.

Cutting-edge innovation that puts the customer at the centre of everything defines how Thailand’s TMBThanachart Bank has been operating in recent years.

Its mission is to revolutionize banking and deliver personalized solutions to clients by making their financial well-being a top priority. Its success is clear – and is likely to be long-lasting.

With great power comes great responsibility, goes the saying. In a country’s financial markets, being a domestic systemically important banks (D-SIBs) also comes with its own share of responsibility – to shareholders, to clients, and to the stability of the broader market.

In Thailand, D-SIB TMBThanachart Bank (ttb) has taken that responsibility seriously by focusing on its core philosophy: to Make REAL Change.

That has involved creating a new banking approach focused on three ecosystem target groups, centred around ttb’s strengths and competitive edge: the salary man, the car owner, and the homeowner. ttb has harmonized that with a push to take its products and services to the next level by leveraging the concept of human digital banking, making for a hardto-beat client proposition.

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The result: ttb walked away with three key awards in The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards: Best AI Initiative, Best Digital Sales Initiative and Mortgage Product of the Year.

Unmatched personalisation One of ttb’s cutting-edge innovations came in 2021 when it launched Delphi Personalized Engine as a response to the uniqueness of individual customer needs. Built in-house, Delphi is a REAL-TIME personalisation engine that tailors experiences or communication based on data-driven analysis of customer behaviour. Using logic, machine learning, optimisation and reinforcement learning, Delphi anticipates a client’s needs and pains, and fine-tunes solutions that are sent to the right customers at the right time and through what the client considers the right channel of communication.

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That level of personalisation reflects ttb’s ability to keep its ears to the ground, know what clients want and when, and provide them with the right products or services.

Critically, Delphi is not a black box, and understands there is no one-size-fits-all solution – which is important given ttb caters to roughly 10 million customers as Thailand’s sixth-largest retail bank by assets, including 4.5 million clients through mobile banking. The engine is fairly transparent in how it captures bite-size information and insights from customers and turns them into relevant products and services, as well as personalised messages or sales scripts for ttb’s relationship managers.

behaviour, with the intention of providing them with better financial well-being. This emphasis chimes with ttb’s overall focus areas for clients: mindful spending and smart saving, healthy borrowing, investing for the future, and sufficient protection.

To that end – and to emphasise responsible digital lending sales – ttb has streamlined processes to make the sales journey entirely digital, meaning clients can access products and obtain loans conveniently with just a few clicks.

For example, Delphi helped over 2 million customers go through ttb for free life and accident coverage.

It helped clients be more mindful of saving and spending by suggesting promotions based on their lifestyles and behaviours. And it helped identify clients needing cash for their homes or cars, and recommended debt consolidation programmes that cut their interest burden.

This approach – ttb boasts an 80% accuracy rate on Delphi – has resonated well with ttb’s roster of clients, who are now engaging more with the bank, are responsive to cross-selling options and are keener than ever to remain loyal to the firm. ttb is seeing three times higher client engagement thanks to Delphi, 90% customer satisfaction, and three times growth in personal loans sales volumes and 9 times higher credit card bookings.

For financial well-being support, too, Delphi has ushered in change. Some 29% of ttb’s previously late-paying customers are now on time with their credit card bills, and 57% are on time with their home loan payments. An impressive transformation, indeed.

RESPONSIBLE DIGITAL LENDING SALES

ttb taps into an omnichannel sales approach to reach a board base of customers while keeping costs contained. The firm’s sales teams rely on everything from social media and mobile app push notifications to phone advisory services to stay close to their clients.

ttb has revolutionized unsecured lending in Thailand through its groundbreaking initiative of Responsible Digital Lending Sales. The initiative prioritises a customer-centric approach but leverages data-driven strategies and behavioural science to provide a more unique and tailor-made experience.

The bank has also rolled out risk-based pricing in a bid to reward good and timely payment behaviour with lower interest rates. For this, ttb once again uses customer data to analyse the risk profiles of clients to have a better balance between profitability and risk mitigation.

The idea is to help customers choose the right products based on their preferences and financial

The results have been impressive. ttb has seen consistently low delinquency and non-performing

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loan ratios of just 1%, ensuring the sustainability of the business model even during periods of significant growth.

Digital lending sales for credit cards spiked 2.5 times year-on-year, while personal loans grew a remarkable 3.9 times in 2022 – both outperforming the industry average. ttb’s digital pivot has also boosted productivity and reduced client acquisition costs, helping prop up the bank’s top-line growth.

The important thing is that by focusing on responsible digital lending sales, ttb is able to make an impact in numerous ways. Internally, it’s able to lower costs and boost its client base. Externally, its customers are more financially savvy and able to reduce their financial burdens. This will, in turn, give them greater access to borrowing for essential needs like homes or cars, with will help spur the Thai economy to new heights. ttb’s role will be invaluable in that journey.

instalment amount and offers households more liquidity, reduces the interest due on debt, provides an easier way to manage debt, and instils better financial discipline among clients.

Thais certainly seem to agree. The initiative generated a 137% spike in high-yield mortgage loan growth for ttb in 2022, and a loan book of THB 1.67 billion, higher than the targeted THB 1 billion. For 2023, the targets were a loan credit line of THB 2 billion and interest savings of THB 374m for clients, with ttb achieving THB 1.4 billion of loans and THB 237 million in savings by the end of the first half of 2023. ttb’s focus on transforming customers’ banking experience while making their financial well-being a priority offers it a clear edge over peers – and gives real meaning to being a responsible bank.

HOMEOWNER SUPPORT Another reason for ttb’s stellar reputation in Thailand’s financial circles is the way it has stayed close to clients during good times and the bad.

Nothing exemplified that better than the way ttb supported customers who were drowning in debt and were cash-strapped after the worst of the COVID-19 health crisis. ttb’s answer was rolling out a retail banking debt consolidation programme, specifically targeted at homeowners, in the fourth quarter of 2021. Through the scheme, homeowners could use their homes as collateral to consolidate high-rate loans – be it credit card or personal loans – into one with a lower interest rate and monthly payments.

The objective was to promote healthy borrowing among clients and give them avenues to exit their existing high interest rate debt burden and better manage their liquidity.

Given the solid market response, ttb even bolstered this scheme in 2022 by increasing the credit limit to up to THB 15 million from THB 10 million, and by expanding the types of collateral to include homes and vacant land in 2023.

The debt consolidation scheme is unique in Thailand and goes a long way in easing the financial strain facing customers. The programme lowers the

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How HSBC Hong Kong remains a credit card and wealth leader HSBC’s long-established roots and standing in Hong Kong mean it is constantly pushing itself to be ahead of peers in every part of the banking industry. In line with its strong performance and service excellence, it has leveraged its credit card to appeal to the affluent and mass customers, while offering powerful solutions for its wealthy clients.

HSBC has consistently been a formidable force in Hong Kong, thanks in large part to its strong retail banking presence, solid private banking platform, a robust digital franchise and its credit card dominance. The past year was no different, with HSBC Hong Kong bolstering its proposition for even better client experience.

A case in point: HSBC has been the most consistent market-leading personal credit card issuer in Hong Kong, because of its focus on providing a full suite of comprehensive and relevant products, services, card privileges, offers and rewards to its customers.

Core to that is HSBC’s RewardCash programme, a bespoke credit card loyalty programme that allows customers to earn the most from every dollar they spend. When combined with the HSBC Reward+ app, its appeal only widens.

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The HSBC Reward+ app is not new. Rather, it was launched in 2018 as a one-stop rewards management platform for customers to manage their offers and their RewardCash. But the app’s transformation over the past few years to become an ‘intelligent digital companion’ for credit card customers has been nothing short of remarkable.

REVOLUTIONISING THE HSBC REWARD+ APP That transformation has focused on providing the best-in-class experience for customers through innovation, offering merchants more comprehensive exposures to develop their businesses and acquire new customers, and to further differentiate HSBC’s offerings from that of competitors.

To that end, the emphasis in 2022 was on a few things. First was unveiling a new design for the

recorded a 25% growth in the number of active users year-on-year.

MARRYING RETAIL AND WEALTH AMBITIONS It’s no surprise then that HSBC Hong Kong took home the award for the Best Credit Card of the Year in Hong Kong in The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards.

HSBC Reward+ app that fostered more engagement from customers. Second was leveraging big data and artificial intelligence to analyse customers’ spending behaviour and tailoring credit card offers and recommendations in line with that.

The benefits of this new mechanism have been impressive, with the click-through rates on inapp offers seeing a 30% fillip.

The recommended merchants have also seen

10% sales incremental within one month since the feature’s launch.

Third, customers can enjoy a better omni-channel experience, supported by a Live Chat and Chat Bot for credit card account services and inquiries – meaning a faster and more efficient way to address client needs.

And lastly, HSBC has launched the first-ever merchant e-marketplace on the HSBC Reward+ app, helping connect card customers with merchants for online-to-offline shopping, thereby also boosting merchants’ participation in the bank’s rewards programmes.

With the extensive merchant partnership network and digital solutions up for grabs, HSBC provides the most comprehensive and flexible options for customers to use their RewardCash anytime and anywhere.

That wasn’t all. HSBC Hong Kong also won awards for the Best Digital Wealth Platform, Best Hybrid Wealth Management Offering, Best Wealth Planning for Affluent Clients and Best Bank for Client Advisory, while receiving Highly Acclaimed nods for its Debit Card and its Frictionless Banking Experience.

The diversity of HSBC’s wins shows that wealth customers are also a priority.

The bank caters to their needs through offerings like Future Planner, a feature launched in June 2022 within the Hong Kong mobile app. This allows customers to set trackable life goals around retirement, property purchase or childcare education, and then visualises the client’s future financial profile and helps them tailor their portfolios accordingly to achieve those targets.

Notably, Future Planner uses interactive visuals and a sophisticated design so customers can easily understand their financial projections – a feat that will likely lead to new cross-selling opportunities for HSBC. All this goes to show that by upholding customer centricity and understanding clients’ pain points – whether they are wealth or retail – and finding ways to connect every touchpoint of their life through innovation, personalisation and digitally-savvy tools, HSBC remains a frontrunner in Hong Kong’s financial industry.

The flexibility has made RewardCash and HSBC Reward+ app a critical loyalty programme and platform that suits customers’ evolving needs.

Thanks to its appeal, customers have become more engaged with HSBC, leading to higher spending and more downloads of the Reward+ app, which

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW SHOBHIT MAINI

Co-Head of Digital Assets, Global Markets, Citi

We do not see a full displacement of traditional rails, rather a case of parallel infrastructures mutually co-existing and reinforcing each other.”

TDB: Citi has been fairly active in leveraging blockchain technologies namely through its participation in the Regulated Liability Network, rollout of Citi Token Services and smart contract platforms etc. What are the principal goals for Citi’s digital assets business and how is its risk appetite being defined?

SM: Our approach to blockchain technology and digital assets is centred around clients i.e. how can we enable access to new assets and tokenized versions of traditional assets; and how can we deliver the benefits of this technology to clients to drive value for them including improved operational efficiencies, faster processing, fractionalization, programmability and transparency. Any

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digital assets or blockchain initiative that we undertake goes through a three-part filter – the first prong is about whether or not we see a client demand for a product or service. The second prong is a consideration of whether we understand all the risks associated with the product or service, and more importantly are we able to manage these risks, and finally, whether or not we can provide the product and service consistent with our regulatory obligations in the jurisdictions under considerations. If the answer is yes to all three of these questions, then we move to implementation TDB: What key business challenges are you looking to solve for your institutional clients through blockchain and tokenisation and what opportunities do you see for Citi’s digital assets business in 2024?

SM: Digital Assets and Blockchain continues to be challenging area for regulated institutions as it is at the confluence of evolving technology, market structure and regulatory frameworks. With that context, the challenge that not only us, but the entire industry is very motivated to address is interoperability of various blockchain based infrastructures.

For example, tokenized securities and cash for most part exist on different networks that are currently not compatible – this hinders unlocking benefits around settlement and other post trade efficiencies,

and will prevent the realization of the full potential of this technology. The solution requires a combination of tech innovation, legal work and network development, and it is encouraging to see many innovative startups and traditional finance firms working hand in hand to solve this problem.

We are working on a number of Tokenization related initiatives across the organization that can create potential benefits for payments, trade finance, distribution, collateral mobility, issuance and settlement efficiencies.

TDB: Citi has just announced the development of an on-chain FX solution under MAS’ Project Guardian. What tangible value are you looking to realise through blockchain based FX trade transactions? Also, when can we expect the application to be rolled out to institutional clients?

SM: As I mentioned in our announcement, there are many proof points that demonstrate the impact of blockchain on driving post trade efficiencies, but not many for conducting pre-trade and execution phases of a trade lifecycle using this tech while retaining critical features such as limiting trading with authorized counterparties, capital efficiencies, maintain privacy of data associated with trades/quotes and pricing competitiveness. The majority of our current trading with clients is bilateral and we wanted to explore the feasibility of conducting such trades over blockchain.

Earlier this year we issued a report that estimated that ~10 tn worth of assets could exist on blockchain by 2030. To settle and trade these assets, new infrastructure may be required. The main benefit demonstrated in this solution was data immutability as all quotes and executed trades are recorded on blockchain that enables real time post

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trade analysis such as best execution analysis. Other potential benefits of blockchain (not tested in this solution) is that the front to back trade lifecycle can be enable on a single infrastructure reducing counterparty risk due to true PvP on much faster settlement cycles, possibly even near instantaneous. We will continue to be led by client feedback to determine any useful additional features. At this point, there are currently no plans for a commercial rollout of this solution.

TDB: Blockchain technology continues to be heavily tested and trialled for different use-cases by different players in the industry. As governance, regulatory and operational frameworks evolve do you see the blockchain based infrastructure meaningfully displacing traditional rails within financial markets - at least in the short-term? Is this a case of parallel infrastructures mutually co-existing and reinforcing each other?

SM: We think of this technology as a meaningful component part of the broader digital transformation of financial services. We are on a 5–10-year journey where blockchain infrastructures will be deployed to solve most pressing problems rather than a full replacement of traditional rails, therefore we do not see a full displacement of traditional rails, rather a case of parallel infrastructures mutually co-existing and reinforcing each other. .

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Metaco transforms global digital asset infrastructure through Harmonize™ By: The Digital Banker

The digital assets universe has truly gone mainstream, with up to 10% of all financial assets expected to be tokenized and represented on blockchains and distributed ledgers by 2030, according to projections by lenders HSBC and Northern Trust.

However the reality is that when interacting with and operating digital assets, represented on private or public blockchains, institutions are faced with many challenges and trade-offs. These range from how to securely issue or safekeep digital assets, to how to create liquidity and networked services around this new and emerging asset class.

Consider, Metaco Harmonize™, with its bank-grade security architecture for digital asset custody, underpinned by asset-agnostic compliance frameworks. Metaco Harmonize™, removes any trade-offs and enables top-tier banks, exchanges, financial institutions and corporations to create long-lasting competitive advantage in the new digital asset economy.

Specifically, the Harmonize™ platform enables institutions to deploy ambitious digital asset

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use cases with the most secure and versatile infrastructure, while being able to issue, store, trade, transfer, settle and service any type of digital asset.

PIONEERING INNOVATION TO BECOME PLATFORM OF CHOICE BY LEADING INSTITUTIONS In that respect, the last two years have been phenomenal for Metaco, and its mission-critical platform has been mandated for strategic projects by the world’s global custodians, after intensive due diligence and technical proofs-of-concept.

Notable new publicly announced clients of Metaco recently include marquee brands such as HSBC, BBVA Switzerland, DZ BANK, BNP Paribas, Societe Generale, DekaBank, VP Bank, Zodia Custody, Archax and Togg.

Furthermore, In Asia Pacific, Metaco’s long-standing partnership with DBS Digital Exchange has resulted in a doubling of institutional investors onboarded in 2022, with custodied BTC and ETH growing by over 100% and 60% respectively.

Similarly, DBS also expanded the service to

accredited investor clients of DBS Private Bank, and plans to expand its crypto service in Hong Kong, where Metaco is already working with a publicly listed securities services firm. National custodian UnionBank of the Philippines has been live since 2022 on Metaco Harmonize™ to pilot the launch of crypto services for its clients.

ENABLING A TRULY FUTURE-PROOF PLATFORM THAT SUPPORTS ANY DIGITAL ASSET USE CASE Metaco has truly established itself as the gold standard for top-tier banks and financial institutions, providing them with institutional-grade digital asset custody infrastructure that brings both the security and the flexibility required to build complex business use cases in a fully regulated and compliant environment.

Metaco is now on a mission to democratize access to this unique technology for the broader banking

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and financial ecosystem, as it continues to make the platform more accessible and simpler to procure, deploy and use.

Likewise, this empowers any institution, no matter its size or sophistication, to have a highly secure, low-risk and low-effort way to test digital asset and tokenization use-cases, with a seamless pathway of moving into production and commercialising offers.

Indeed, Metaco’s custody and orchestration platform is systematically aligned with the needs of its institutional clients, complying with the stringent requirements of global custodians, subcustodians and top-tier banks while enabling them to seamlessly interact with the web3 dApp ecosystem.

Affirming its institutional achievements for its role in developing mission-critical digital asset infrastructure, The Digital Banker has recognised Metaco as the “Best Technology Solution Provider for Digital Assets” at the recently concluded Digital Assets Awards 2023 program.

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Open API, Open Opportunities: Comarch’s Blueprint for SME Banking Excellence There is no question, digital transformation has ceased to be a passing trend and has become a pivotal shift in operational and customer engagement paradigms.

Comarch, with its deep-rooted expertise in digitisation within the financial sector, is at the forefront of this revolution. This commitment to innovation and excellence has been recognised at the Global BankTech Awards 2023 organised

by The Digital Banker, where Comarch was honoured with the title of “Best API/Open Banking Platform Provider for SME Banking”. This award is a nod to Comarch’s focus on tailoring its services to the intricate needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and underlines its role as a catalyst for digital enablement within this vital business segment.

“Comarch’s profound impact on SME banking has been solidified by its Open API approach and the creation of a flexible and integrative digital ecosystem,” said Nirav Patel, Managing Director of The Digital Banker. “Their platform’s ability to drive growth and reduce costs for SMEs, while maintaining security and ease of use, has set a benchmark in the industry, making them a clear choice for this award.”

CRAFTING A DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM FOR SMES SME clients find themselves in an increasingly competitive landscape, where agility and digital savviness are not just advantages but necessities.

Comarch has acknowledged this by creating an ecosystem rich in varied products designed to support SMEs in their business endeavours. This ecosystem is constructed on a technological bedrock utilising microservices and micro frontends, aligning with the principles of cloudnative applications.

The foundation of Comarch’s solution leverages a framework for both front and back office operations, allowing for a flexible configuration and content enrichment tailored to SME needs.

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Their comprehensive Comarch Design System Library provides a suite of graphical components to ensure seamless user experiences, crucial for businesses that need to adapt quickly to changing market demands.

Moreover, Comarch’s offering includes a range of complementary services such as configurable dashboards, Form Creators, and Business Process Creators. These services empower SMEs to customise their work environment, creating products, surveys, and applications without extensive IT involvement.

By furnishing businesses with tools like the Rules Engine and multi-channel communication sets, Comarch facilitates a selfsufficient approach to managing processes and client interactions.

An integral part of Comarch’s digital transformation strategy is its open API approach.

With interfaces based on OpenAPI 3.0, Comarch ensures its services are not only user-friendly but can also be effortlessly integrated with third-party applications. This interoperability is a boon for SMEs that rely on a myriad of tools and services, as it enables them to weave an interconnected network of applications, all communicating fluidly within the Comarch ecosystem.

FLEXIBLE MODEL OF COOPERATION: BUY, BUILD & OWN Comarch stands out through its innovative flexible model of cooperation that marries the concepts of buying, building, and owning - a trifecta that assures SMEs can step into the digital age with confidence and support.

The ‘Buy’ aspect of the model presents a lowprice, quick time-to-market advantage. Financial institutions, especially SMEs with often limited resources, can purchase a licensed product that bypasses the heavy investment typically associated with research and development.

‘Build’ represents the solution’s flexibility and the inherent customisation mechanisms it possesses, including a full software development kit (SDK) for developers and low-code or no-code tools for those without technical expertise. This allows SMEs to shape the solution to their unique needs, a crucial feature for businesses that must remain nimble and responsive to market shifts.

Lastly, the ‘Own’ element ensures that clients gain ownership of the most critical part of the application – the business pattern. This ownership provides SMEs with the independence and security needed to operate confidently in a digital landscape.

operations and data processing, thus aiding SMEs in managing the increasing volume of digital transactions securely and efficiently.

Digital adeptness is the name of the game. With Comarch’s solution platform, a significant stride in banking digital transformation, particularly for SME clients, can be achieved with precision and confidence.

The foundation of Comarch’s solution leverages a framework for both front and back office operations, allowing for a flexible configuration and content enrichment tailored to SME needs.”

DRIVING SME GROWTH THROUGH DIGITAL INNOVATION For SMEs, the implementation of Comarch’s solution platform is transformative. Not only does it cater to the digital needs of these enterprises, but it also facilitates an ecosystem where various products coexist and complement each other to support SME business operations comprehensively.

Banking services within the Comarch platform are extensive, covering everything from basic account management to advanced cash management and investment services. This breadth of service allows SMEs to access enterprise-level banking functionalities, optimising their financial management and bolstering their growth.

Furthermore, Comarch’s continuous investment in R&D, particularly in AI, promises future enhancements that will further streamline

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW TOH SU MEI CEO, ANEXT Bank

TDB: ANEXT Bank has developed and introduced a unique value proposition for SMEs in Singapore. What has been the guiding vision and philosophy for the digital bank and what unmet needs for SMEs, particularly small businesses, are you looking to address that have not been adequately serviced by incumbents?

Toh: When ANEXT Bank was launched, we did so with a mission to reimagine financial services for financial inclusion. Our aim is to accelerate financial inclusion through technology-driven innovation to deliver accessible and effortless financial services for SMEs, not just in Singapore where we’re headquartered but also across the region.

Singapore may have a highly banked population but studies have shown that SMEs are still underserved by the country’s banking sector. According to a Deloitte research, 72% of SMEs require funding for working capital and to mitigate cashflow problems1. In a recent survey we conducted2, we found that 7 in 10 Singapore SMEs wanted to get access to financial services from non-banking platforms.

Additionally, one-third of SMEs surveyed found it difficult to get access to financing due to their business not meeting the

requirements of existing financing options, lack of financing options or loan amounts not meeting their business needs.

This is the financing gap we hope to address by offering affordable and flexible financing options for SMEs. They can access it either directly through us or from our partners onboard the ANEXT Programme for Industry Specialists (APIs). Through APIs, we work with industry partners to serve their customers’ financing needs directly on their platforms to reduce the friction and hassle of banking.

TDB: What have been the key business outcomes and achievements following ANEXT Bank’s soft launch in June, 2022 and how has this informed your strategy for the Bank going forward?

Toh: We saw strong demand for our digital financial services among SMEs, especially micro and growing businesses – those whom we set out to serve. ANEXT Bank is staying true to its mission and its customer base is reflective of its efforts:.

• 68% of our customers are Micro Businesses (MSMEs)

1 https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/sg/Documents/financial-services/sea-fsi-digital-banking-small-medium-enterprises-noexp.pdf 2 Survey commissioned by ANEXT Bank carried out by YouGov Singapore Pte. Limited with 202 Singapore SMEs in Oct 2023.

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• Additionally, we have also observed that 78% of our ANEXT Business Account customers and 56% of ANEXT Business Loan customers are micro businesses.

• 31% of our customers are Foreign Business Owners who have incorporated a business in Singapore. They are made up of 44 different nationalities.

• We’ve seen an average of 40% monthon-month increase in cross-border transactions by our customers – testament to supporting their internationalisation efforts.

Besides knowing that we are on track to delivering what we had set out to do, this is also testimony to the offerings we’ve launched and looking to continually enhance:

• ANEXT Business Account - A multicurrency deposit account that is free to set up with no maintenance or minimum balance fees, and rewards SMEs with daily interest on account balances.

• ANEXT Business Loan – A fuss-free and flexible unsecured financing solution of up to S$300,000 with flexible repayment options. The minimum loan amount available starts at S$5,000 and no additional document submission is required for loans under S$30,000. ● ANEXT Fixed Deposit – Intended to provide SMEs an alternate way to grow their business funds while having access to it when needed, with tenures from as short as one month up to 36 months, and placement amounts from as little as US$5,000.

• ANEXT Programme for Industry Specialists – The programme aims to make digital financial services more accessible through embedded financing solutions, so SMEs in Singapore and the region, can access and manage their financing wherever they are doing their business digitally at. It is open to the participation of e-commerce solution providers, delivery and services platforms, trade and procurement platforms, and payment services platforms who support SMEs’ cross-border operations through digitalbased services or platforms.

• SME Friends of ANEXT – An initiative to better understand the challenges SMEs face and to reimagine financial services together. To start off, we invited 8 business owners of different expertise and experience to share their stories, challenges and pain points. Hear their stories here.

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TDB: The SME financing gap continues to grow across ASEAN and there is a clear opportunity to engage with SME clients through high quality digital interactions.

How has ANEXT Bank re-imagined the SME client journey to enable faster access to credit and ease of repayment?

Toh: As a digital bank, our financial services are naturally readily accessible. But what we’ve ensured is to also make it simpler, safer and more rewarding for SMEs to get financial services from us. SMEs, especially micro and growing businesses, now have an additional option to get access to financial services, whether it’s to manage their day-to-day business or for business growth.

Examples of how we have been doing so include: • Offering a full digital onboarding process, which includes being the first to avail remote onboarding for SMEs. This means business owners based anywhere in the world can easily start a relationship with a bank by opening an account as long as they have a Singapore-incorporated business, or get access to financing and fixed deposits.

• Omitting the cumbersome paperwork that SMEs’ tend to face whilst applying for financing with our ANEXT Business Loan as no additional documents are required for loan amounts under S$30,000. For loan amounts above S$30,000 (it was $300K, pls keep a tighter watch), we only require their latest 6 months’ bank statements.

• Offering SMEs daily interest on their account balances and availing investment options in the form of fixed deposits with placements as short as 1 month and as little as US$5,000 as a way to grow their funds without having their cashflow tied up for long periods.

• Giving SMEs peace of mind as we’re regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and offer three-factor authentication for all transactions via facial verification. They can also access banking services on-the-go with our Online Banking platform and mobile app.

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TDB: It has been a year since the launch of the ANEXT Programme for Industry Specialists.

What has been the response from ecosystem partners and how is the initiative looking to transform the delivery of embedded finance solutions and augment financial inclusion efforts?

Toh: Financial inclusion is a collective effort across the ecosystem, from banks, industry partners to public sector agencies. We believe that innovation will happen faster when we do it together in an open and collaborative manner, which is also why we started the ANEXT Programme for Industry Specialists (APIs) in 2022.

Having run the APIs for a year, we’ve been able to apply the learnings and deliver new embedded financial services solutions via our latest partners – DeliveryChinatown, Hong Xin Da and Shopmatic. These new solutions extend beyond financing; industry partners are now able to avail interestbearing offerings, such as allowing their customers to earn interest on their wallet balances, or placing fixed deposits. To make it even easier for our partners, who are more often than not SMEs themselves, we launched the APIs repository as part of the enhanced programme.

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By working with these new partners as part of our APIs, we aim to make financial services more accessible to more than one million regional SMEs within the year.

We welcome all e-commerce solution providers, delivery and services platforms, trade and procurement platforms, and payment services platforms who support SMEs’ cross-border operations through digital-based services or platforms to join us in our mission to reimagine financial services and scale access to financial solutions to support SMEs’ growth ambitions.

SMEs can also nominate the platforms they are doing business at here www.anext.com. sg/partner-us

Standard Chartered Singapore scales new heights with its digital-plus-people strategy Standard Chartered Bank Singapore has been a catalyst for change in the city’s banking landscape, turning to its digital capabilities and stable employee force to fuel growth – and laying the foundation for bigger things in the future.

Standard Chartered Bank has established strong roots in Singapore since it opened its first branch in the city in 1859. It has been a stable banking force in the city-state and has recently become a catalyst for change for itself and for its clients.

Indeed, staying attuned to the ever-evolving needs of clients and catering to them digitally has become incredibly important at Standard Chartered. This has meant unveiling a new SC Mobile app with a friendly user interface, hyper-personalisation and intuitive features last year to much success and continuing with its long-established commitment to offering

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customers the best digital experience possible.

In light of its success, Standard Chartered took a whole host of accolades at The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards. It was awarded the Best Digital Bank (Incumbent) – Singapore, Outstanding Customer Service Innovation by a Retail Bank – Singapore, Best Savings Account – Singapore, Outstanding Staff Training, Learning and Development Program – Singapore, Best Deposit Product of the Year (Wealth), and Highly Acclaimed award for Best Self-Service Banking.

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DIGITAL DISRUPTION Standard Chartered sets the standard for digital banking as it focuses on convenience, security and innovation, while prioritising client satisfaction and a seamless user experience. Thanks to that, close to 85% of the bank’s clients are using their digital banking services.

The bank has also successfully married its digital strengths with its sustainability agenda by unveiling a Green Branch initiative. The objective is to go paperless at branches, allowing digital authentication of transactions, and accepting e-signatures for certain product applications.

When it comes to self-service banking, Standard Chartered was quick to spot the hassle of applying physically at bank branches for a temporary credit limit increase (TCLI). To solve that problem, the bank’s Credit Cards and Personal Loans team introduced a digital application process for TCLI, improving efficiency, offering real-time decisioning and making the process accessible and convenient.

The journey was further simplified when the bank optimised the number of steps within the application journey, further enhancing the client experience.

PRODUCT PROFILES A differentiator at Standard Chartered is its JumpStart savings account, targeted at young adults aged 18 to 26, as they start out on their careers.

It is an account with up to 2.5% p.a. from the first dollar up to S$50,000 with no fees and no minimum deposit balance required.

JumpStart was given a boost in March 2022, when Standard Chartered added a step-up interest rate

that can be unlocked if customers make investments into unit trusts or in the equities market. The result is two-fold: it helps customers earn more interest on their savings, while paving the way for them to start their investing journey.

At the other end of the spectrum, on the affluent segment, Standard Chartered’s Wealth $aver is the first-of-its-kind affluent deposit account that pays interest based on client’s relationship with the Bank determined by their assets under management.

Additionally, Wealth $aver allows clients to unlock bonus interest through the Wealth Booster promotion when they purchase new wealth products with the bank. It is also a multicurrency account that offers 1% cashback on debit card spends, with no additional transaction fee on the foreign currency spend for 13 major currencies.

Its success has been impressive. Wealth $aver has given Standard Chartered’s bankers a novel angle to use to bring in new priority banking clients, thanks to which it hit 100% of its client target within the first nine months of launch. The new clients are also twice as engaged, vindicating the firm’s approach.

A final winning factor at Standard Chartered is how it has left no stone unturned when it comes to empowering employees, accelerating the future readiness of its workforce through a growing suite of training and upskilling programmes to prepare for opportunities in key growth areas such as sustainable finance, cybersecurity and cloud engineering. This is delivered via aXess academy, its global learning hub anchored in Singapore, and diSCover, its self-led learning portal.

Standard Chartered’s focus on the critical issues of both today and tomorrow make it an exemplary banking institution that is primed for more growth.

Over 10,000 Standard Chartered clients join SC Inner Circle to co-create more intuitive banking experiences Standard Chartered Singapore (the Bank) has introduced SC Inner Circle, a revolutionary client engagement concept designed to gain authentic client insights and co-create more intuitive banking experiences, products and digital platforms.

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As banking services have become more integrated in everyone’s daily life, deepening client engagement beyond in-app engagement is crucial in creating better banking experiences across product and channel mix. The Bank recognises the need to gain valuable insights from its clients on its offerings and

banking experience and launched SC Inner Circle.

Since its launch in May 2023, more than 10,000 clients signed up to be part of SC Inner Circle.

Through focus groups, one-on-one discussions and surveys, clients have a say in the design and delivery of the initiatives, products and services which the Bank launches. The Bank leverages on these valuable insights to shape its offerings and banking experience.

present to hear what customers had to say directly with senior management present. This showed sincerity, vulnerability and accountability! I was also delighted to see Standard Chartered appreciating the people behind-the-scenes making things work in the organisation. Well done on this initiative!” Dr. Tony Tan, a client of Standard Chartered Singapore and an SC Inner Circle member.

Nauman Bashir, Head of Digital, Data & Customer Value Management, said:

SHAPING THE DIGITAL BANKING EXPERIENCE One of the pilot client insights study was to finetune the design and innovation process of its mobile banking platform, SC Mobile. Through focus group studies, the Bank identified two key findings – clients want to spend less time performing banking transactions and they want a more simplified way to view their portfolio with the Bank.

With these two problem statements in mind, the Bank set out to design a more seamless and intuitive banking platform geared towards improving these areas. Its clients now spend less time on their topperformed transactions. PayNow transactions on SC Mobile now take an average of 17.2s, which is 40% faster compared with the industry average, and PayNow QR code payments can now be completed in 16.4s, 30% faster than the industry average. A newly designed home screen was also introduced, allowing clients to see their entire portfolio – accounts, investments, credit cards, loans and insurances, at a glance.

CO-CREATION OF NEW PRODUCTS The Bank focuses on the importance of the partnership with our clients, leveraging on SC Inner Circle community as a valuable platform for ideas, testing and concepts. By constantly engaging select groups of clients, the Bank can better understand the specific needs and preferences to co-create new products. The use of the client community continues to allow the Bank to gather important insights and also build inclusivity, ultimately leading to the development of client-centric products and solutions.

“It’s been a pleasure to join the SC Inner Circle programme. At the fire chat event I participated in, it was noteworthy that both customers and staff were

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At Standard Chartered, client-centricity is ingrained in our culture.

On top of leveraging on cutting-edge technologies and AI, we also recognise that meaningful interactions with clients are important for us to understand the solutions they need. Through the SC Inner Circle, we come together with our clients not as bankers and clients, but as co-creators to collaborate and provide a best-in-class digital experience. Insights from the SC Inner Circle drive regular improvements to our digital platforms, products, and services, ensuring they align with customer expectations and needs.”

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ServiceNow’s Vision: Creating a More Connected, Agile Banking World Digital transformation is the heartbeat of business operations, and ServiceNow stands out as a key player in the banking sector, driving digital transformation forward. The company’s pivotal role gained notable recognition at the Global BankTech Awards 2023, hosted by The Digital Banker, where it won the Outstanding SME Banking Technology Solution by a Vendor – Back Office award.

Through its cloud-based platform and a comprehensive range of services, ServiceNow has transformed banking operations, enhancing efficiency, transparency, and reducing operational costs.

Reflecting on this achievement, Nirav Patel, Managing Director of The Digital Banker, remarked, “ServiceNow’s exceptional capability to integrate complex systems and streamline banking operations while enhancing customer and employee experiences has set them apart. Their innovative approach in leveraging AI and ML for smarter, faster solutions undoubtedly played a pivotal role in earning them this prestigious award.”

UNIFYING ORGANISATIONS THROUGH DIGITAL INNOVATION ServiceNow’s ethos resonates deeply within the banking industry: ServiceNow makes the world work better for everyone. Its cloud-based platform and solutions help digitize and unify organisations so that they can find smarter, faster, better ways to 44

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make work flow, so employees and customers can be more connected, more innovative, and more agile, enabling us all to create the future we imagine.

One of ServiceNow’s strengths lies in its adaptability. Banks can seamlessly adapt to business needs and improve organisational agility with a low-code, intelligent platform.”

This philosophy is particularly evident in their Financial Services Operations for Banking offering.

Launched in 2020, this product is designed to meet the unique, pressing needs of banks. It focuses on delivering exceptional customer experiences, innovating at scale with a single system of action, connecting siloed processes, managing real-time risk and compliance, and accelerating value through automation and analytics.

With ServiceNow, banks can achieve an unprecedented level of work orchestration and automation. This is not just about streamlining existing processes; it’s about fundamentally transforming how banks operate. ServiceNow enables banks to quickly unite disparate teams, processes, and technologies with a single platform, maximising the value of existing systems without the need to rip and replace.

Financial Services Operations for Banking is a testament to this capability. It includes innovative features like Disputes Management, Intelligent Servicing for Fraud, and persona-based workspaces, as well as strategic integrations with Jack Henry, Socure, and Equifax to name a few. These features not only improve operational efficiency but also enhance customer experiences, a critical factor in the competitive banking sector.

ADAPTING SEAMLESSLY TO EVOLVING BUSINESS NEEDS One of ServiceNow’s strengths lies in its adaptability.

Banks can seamlessly adapt to business needs and improve organisational agility with a low-code, intelligent platform. The product’s architechure supports a range of configurations and integrations, including connections with key technology partners like Microsoft, Adobe, and DocuSign. This flexibility ensures that banks can stay ahead in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

The platform’s functional features, such as its powerful workflow engine and banking-specific data model, enable banks to create flexible data structures tailored to their business needs. Moreover, with real-time data extraction, banks can swiftly identify and address bottlenecks and compliance issues, enhancing regulatory adherence and operational efficiency.

ensures consistent, secure onboarding, streamlines account processes, and provides efficient complaint and escalation management. This comprehensive approach not only saves time and costs but also builds trust and satisfaction among clients.

For employees, ServiceNow offers a unified view of operations, facilitating efficient work distribution and management oversight. The platform’s integration capabilities, like the out-of-the-box Jack Henry integration, provide employees with real-time visibility into accounts and transactions, thereby improving resolution times and customer service quality.

LOOKING AHEAD: THE FUTURE OF SERVICENOW IN BANKING As ServiceNow continues to evolve, it promises further enhancements in its banking solutions. The roadmap for 2024 includes additional integrations, investment in disputes management and fraud, GenAI investments for case summarisation and streamlined servicing, and enhancements in digital engagement channels.

ServiceNow’s innovations in the banking sector represent a significant leap forward in digital transformation. By offering intelligent work orchestration, customizable solutions, and a focus on both customer and employee experiences, ServiceNow is not just a service provider; it’s a transformative force, shaping the future of banking in the digital age.

The impact of ServiceNow on banks extends beyond mere operational enhancements.

It profoundly influences the entire customer lifecycle, from onboarding to servicing to escalations.”

The impact of ServiceNow on banks extends beyond mere operational enhancements. It profoundly influences the entire customer lifecycle, from onboarding to servicing to escalations. The platform

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LH Bank Makes Waves in Thailand with Novel Profita Investment App Land and Houses Bank Public Company Limited or LH Bank has the vision to be a bank that delivers great experience to customers beyond their expectations through innovations, product, services and advisory with quality. The bank’s Profita Investment Application hits the mark and has been instrumental in transforming the investment landscape in the country.

Land and Houses Bank Public Company Limited was established in 2004 and positioned itself as a new choice for consumers in Thailand. A year later, it got approval to set up a commercial retail bank. A financial business group was founded in 2009 and started operating a full commercial banking business in 2011.

Today, the bank is a force to be reckoned within Thailand’s financial circles, thanks to its efforts to constantly innovate, stay on top of trends and themes, know what customers want and don’t want, and tailor its offerings to them accordingly.

A critical component of that innovation came in February 2022 when LH Bank rolled out the Profita Investment Application, a mutual fund investment application developed to provide Thais an easy, convenient and smart way to access financial investment products and services anywhere and anytime.

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The objectives of the project – which had been in the works since May 2021 and required in-depth research to understand clients’ needs and pain points – were clear:  To reduce customers’ turnaround time to open a savings and trading account and start trading  To allow them to open accounts anywhere, without the need to go to a bank branch.  To give them access to a wide range of mutual funds to trade  To give them an unparalleled customer experience, with a robo-advisor to help them manage their portfolios and wealth astutely  To help LH Bank acquire more mutual fund customers Since its launch and following numerous enhancements over the course of 2022, Profita has made impressive strides, which is why LH Bank took

the Highly Acclaimed Award for Best Mobile Banking – Wealth Management in The Digital Banker’s Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards for 2023.

UNIQUE FEATURES Some of Profita’s key features include online verification using the Thai national ID and the ability to open both a savings account and mutual fund account simultaneously – making for a convenient client onboarding process with a significantly shorter turnaround time for account opening and trading.

But perhaps more important is what clients – be it beginners or professional investors – can do for their investments through Profita. Profita condenses the investment world into one app, providing customers with useful information such as returns, historical prices, dividends and Morningstar ratings as well as recommendations from advisory team in line with a client’s risk appetite.

Fund comparisons to buy and switch mutual funds are also possible, with the app additionally offering real-time profit or loss alerts to allow clients to easily manage their portfolios.

Investors can turn, too, to Profita’s robo-advisor for support around everything from suggestions on goal-based investments and funds to invest

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in, to portfolio tracking and recommendations on adjustments to make to be able to stay on track of investment goals. For those thinking longer term, the robo-advisor gives guidance on retirement and wealth planning as well as thematic investment opportunities.

Both the smart robo-advisory and fund comparison features are unique to LH Bank in Thailand, showing how the firm is disrupting the way clients’ bank and invest.

The benefits of the rollout of Profita have been clearly visible. In 2023, LH Bank recorded a 50% year-on-year growth in new mutual fund customers, as younger and more digitally savvy Thais flocked to the bank for the solid user experience its app offers.

LH Bank saw a remarkable

280% year-over-year rise in total investment value in 2023 and a 30% jump in total transactions.

Such numbers show that staying attuned to client needs and offering solutions that meet their demands will go a long way in Thailand’s competitive banking landscape. LH Bank has certainly understood that, putting it on the path to further success.

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HUAWEI EXPLORE IT ON AppGallery and the HUAWEI EXPLORE IT ON AppGallery logo are the registered trademarks of Huawei Technologies Co., Limited.

Standard Chartered Hong Kong: Unlocking the future of banking Standard Chartered Bank is an epitome of digital banking excellence, given its focus over the years on automation, digitisation and simplification. Its unique status and positioning in Hong Kong, combined with the way it has continually evolved to meet the changing needs of clients, will ensure the firm stays ahead of the competition.

Standard Chartered Bank is one of the world’s leading international banking groups, with a presence in nearly 53 markets and serving clients across 64. Listed in both London and Hong Kong, it can be considered a homegrown bank for Hong Kong given it has been operating in the special administrative region since 1859 and is one of three note-issuing banks in the city.

cards and mortgages. And the increasingly digital approach it has adopted across its business makes for a remarkable franchise and the envy of rivals.

Its product suite is naturally vast and diverse.

Standard Chartered offers everything from deposits and wealth management to loan products, credit

For instance, to better serve affluent clients, Standard Chartered focused on enabling easy access to banking and wealth products through self-serve

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The new app and features launched in 2023 by Standard Chartered Hong Kong reflect how it’s able to remain close to clients and innovate in line with their needs.

mobile account opening programmes for unit trusts and equities, marrying that with personalised relationship management services.

It launched the MyWealth Direct on the Standard Chartered mobile app, giving clients the ability to check their wealth product holdings and access personalised investment and wealth advice on the go through the app.

By leveraging big data and analytics and analysing clients’ risk-taking appetite, latest investment and cash holdings, the MyWealth Direct is able to help customers respond faster to market opportunities, tailor investment options and give them real-time actionable investment ideas.

The bank increased its digital investments significantly in 2022, a move that is certainly paying off – digital banking client numbers have soared and new client onboarding is rapid.

To give credit where it’s due, Standard Chartered Hong Kong rightly won the Best Digital Bank in Hong Kong award at the 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards hosted by The Digital Banker – testament to the solid reputation the bank has built in the market, and offering a glimpse of the way forward.

For mass market customers, digital solutions are front and centre as the bank takes a mobile-first approach to serve at scale. Among the recent highlights are the launch of five new credit card services on Standard Chartered’s digital platform – card loss and replacement, PIN reset, balance refund, viewing card CVV and dispute handling – as well as digitising e-advice and the roll-out of more selfserve options including account opening through the bank’s mobile app. The bank also offers digital investment account, and additionally Marathon Saving account, whereby clients can open an account digitally in three steps and enjoy higher interest rates.

COLLABORATIVE MINDSET One of the standouts at the bank is the way it has prioritised embedding banking into the everyday life of its clients.

Standard Chartered teamed up with AlipayHK in November 2021 to launch Q Credit Card, Hong Kong’s first physical and virtual card. Q offers an entirely digital and straight-through journey, including in-app card application, instant card and credit limit approvals.

Another critical partnership is with major airline Cathay Pacific. Clients can automatically earn air miles by banking and spending with Standard Chartered, which they can then use to redeem a host of lifestyle and travel awards. Importantly, they can earn these miles through numerous options, such as Bonus Payroll Account, Standard Chartered Cathay Mastercard and through Asia Miles Time Deposit.

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW SHIRISH WADIVKAR

Global Head, Wholesale Payments & Trade Strategy, Swift

We envision that the financial services industry will be multi-partnered, multi-networked and carry multi-solutions.”

TDB: Given the recent tie-up with Visa on B2B transactions, how is Swift looking to address continued fragmentation and friction in global payments transactions despite the launch of new payment rails and greater cross-border interoperability?

SW: The growing number of networks, platforms and applications will offer new opportunities for our clients, enabling them to offer new applications, uncover new revenue streams and broaden their reach. We envision that the financial services industry will be multipartnered, multi-networked and carry multisolutions.

As a response to this clear trend, we are offering our member banks an option to

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connect to third-party networks, ones relevant for them and their clients. This allows institutions to reuse their existing technology, operational processes and infrastructure to connect to multiple networks at once. Not only will this save time and money, but it will also result in more options for end customers in how they want to pay, be paid, buy and sell assets, or just exchange information across networks.

Visa will deploy capabilities developed by Swift that can help increase the speed and certainty of cross-border money movement.

This includes Swift Payment Pre-validation to enable upfront checks of Visa B2B Connect payments, reducing unnecessary delays by catching potential errors before the payment is initiated.

With so many choices for sending international payments, considerations like data integrity, end-to-end transparency and traceability are becoming essential to the industry as a whole - and Swift plays a valuable role in delivering data services and payment tracking to tie the whole ecosystem together.

These efforts would advance the goals of both organisations to keep the world’s financial infrastructure connected with the right levels of security, resiliency, reliability,

and compliance – to accelerate seamless borderless payments.

TDB: Payments has become an extremely technology-dependent business. How is Swift seeking to leverage nextgen solutions in elevating payments modernisation particularly for financial institutions in emerging and frontier markets?

SW: Payment networks and service providers will benefit from interoperating with us to scale their businesses and to take advantages of Swift’s capabilities like payment tracking, cloud connectivity and pre-validation, which will enhance the delivery of solutions and products – this is how we help widen choice, access and innovative client experiences.

As we are able to orchestrate transactions from end-to-end, full transaction data is maintained, alongside its integrity. For example, the introduction of ISO 20022 as the common language for payments worldwide, will now enable improved quality and richness of data in both domestic and cross-border payments, which in turns will boost operational efficiencies, and improve straight through processing rates.

It is essential for the community to not only use such services, but also ISO 20022 as the standard of the finance ecosystem of the future, to tie the whole ecosystem together.

In order to help the community reap the full benefits of ISO 20022, we are also continually working to monitor data quality and incentivise the use of structured and rich data.

TDB: The threat landscape continues to evolve as new payment methods and channels are introduced to facilitate cross-border transactions. What do you believe are the most significant risk factors for the industry today and how is Swift supporting its partners in overcoming them?

SW: Today, we see three key areas for continued focus in the payments industry: cybersecurity, network resilience and fraud.

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In addition, the industry is also focused on managing the risks related to the adoption of new technologies and changing regulations across different jurisdictions.

The effectiveness of real-time payments relies significantly on a bank’s ecosystem.

An ideal scenario involves a clean ecosystem with comprehensive and accurately formatted payment data. Likewise, downstream compliance processes, such as sanctions screening and transaction monitoring, require precise payment message information for effectiveness.

With Swift Payment Controls (PCS), banks are able to detect anomalies that can be indicative of fraud affecting their institution, customers, or counterparties. Alerting and blocking takes place in real time, so banks can intercept suspicious messages before they are released, preventing financial loss and reputational damage. PCS is hosted on Swift’s secure platform and screens messages “in flight”.

We are working further on anomaly detection offerings to enhance their efficacy by deploying AI driven enhancements and better tools to help detect, and mitigate fraud.

In another bid to prevent errors and frauds in cross-border transactions, we have also launched Swift’s Payment Pre-validation to enable banks to verify payee account details before an international payment is sent. By embedding such data-rich services, we’re able to help financial institutions enhance customer experience, prevent rework and fraud. This API-based solution removes millions of costs to the industry around failed transactions whilst improving the cross-border experience for end customers.

AI and ML technology have the ability to quickly analyse millions of data sets and build accurate predictive models that enhance decision making. This capability is critical as financial crimes evolves. We are developing a state-of-the-art AI platform to help make existing tools more powerful and enable the creation of new ones; and at scale.

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Standard Chartered Malaysia’s SmartStocks breaks equity investment barriers Standard Chartered Malaysia has shaken up the equity investment landscape for the country’s investors with the launch of SmartStocks, an online equity platform that offers a stock diversification avenue for clients without making them cough up exorbitant costs. The offering not only cements the firm’s long-standing commitment to the country, but also shows how digital tools can be used to make stock investing accessible and affordable.

Standard Chartered has a rich history in Malaysia, having set up its first branch in the country in 1875.

Over the years, its commitment to its clients and the country has strengthened as the bank continues to lead the way on many innovations in the Malaysian financial industry.

One such innovation is SmartStocks, an online equity platform on a banking app ecosystem unveiled by the firm in September 2022 to bring online equity capabilities to clients in Malaysia. Its proposition is certainly exciting: it gives clients convenient trading access to equity markets across 12 global exchanges, helping them make smarter decisions everyday through an easy and digital onboarding process.

Clients can trade via any web-enabled device, smartphone or tablet, all of which are equipped

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with relevant tools to facilitate investment-making decisions, as compared to having multiple brokers for different exchanges.

Standard Chartered’s proposition for this is hard to rival. For starters, the digital onboarding process via its SC Mobile app for existing customers is completely digital and can be done within five minutes.

Adding to its appeal is it has no account opening fee, no maintenance fee and no custody fee. The brokerage rate is also standard and can be as low as 0% for the bank’s priority private clients. The access is wide, spanning the exchanges of Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, Australia, Tokyo and Switzerland.

ROBUST ECOSYSTEM What’s notable is how SmartStocks operates. It supports informed investment decision-making by providing instant news updates as well as disseminated financials right into the hands of its clients. Additionally, the SmartStocks’ Refinitiv Report+ feature provides comprehensive stock analysis, including an overall outlook, industry performance versus peers and aggregated scores from top global brokers.

Standard Chartered has certainly got this product right. The purpose of unveiling SmartStocks was to complement the bank’s entire offering to clients for equities, with digital trading being the missing piece of the puzzle.

Now, Standard Chartered can compete even more effectively with its peers by offering the whole suite of investment services to clients on a simple and easy-to-navigate platform. Clients are able to access SmartStocks on the go on mobile or web, buy and sell stocks without any disruptions in the journey and, more importantly, get access to global exchanges.

Standard Chartered has broken down some big barriers in the process. Malaysian retail investors have long faced difficulties gaining access to global markets – with high transaction fees being a persistent concern – but SmartStocks has made it cheaper and convenient for clients to diversify into global stock markets. The ecosystem also allows share consolidation in one equity account for further legacy planning, ease of buying foreign currencies and ease of trading through one platform.

and chat formats for personal and priority banking customers, as well as the first bank to establish a global operations hub in the country.

Over the past few years, its pioneering abilities have come with a digital angle. Standard Chartered recently revamped its Online Unit Trust Platform, which is made available round-the-clock. Clients can now navigate the app easily to explore and invest in a large selection of unit trust funds, create Regular Savings Plans, check current holdings and view transaction history. It also includes the addition of the Fund Comparison Tool, which provides a detailed comparison of selected funds and Fund Select Tear Sheets that summarise the outlook of recommended funds.

Like SmartStocks, Online Unit Trust is available as an in-app feature within the SC Mobile app.

This consistency in business and the focus on providing its Malaysian clients ways to make banking easier are benefitting Standard Chartered Malaysia in a large way. In The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards, SmartStocks was named the Best Equity Trading Platform, marking its second win in a row since its launch.

SOLID FINANCIAL PRODUCTS The Standard Chartered franchise is undoubtedly robust, with its comprehensive range of financial products and services to serve individuals, small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as corporates and institutions with support from its digital and Islamic finance divisions.

More broadly, the product is in line with Standard Chartered’s core strategy of moving from a traditional bank set-up to one leading on the digital front to meet clients’ increasingly diverse and global demands.

This includes accounts and deposits, loans, credit cards, mortgage offerings, investments and wealth solutions and insurance schemes.

STRONG MALAYSIA FORCE

Standard Chartered’s long legacy of improving its services for its clients in Malaysia hasn’t changed over time. Rather, the bank has upped its game – and is well positioned to find more growth opportunities in the country in the years to come.

Standard Chartered in Malaysia has been an innovative force over the years. It was the first bank in Malaysia to offer secured wealth lending in foreign currencies and banking through video, audio

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To learn more about SmartStocks, download the SC Mobile App or visit www.sc.com/my/smartstocks.

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Philippines’ MSMEs thrive on UnionBank’s support Union Bank of the Philippines has delivered for the nation’s micro, small and medium-sized enterprises by sticking with them during the good times and bad, and riding on its digital strengths to bring businesses an unbeatable banking experience. Combine that with top-notch bankers and the franchise only shines brighter.

Union Bank of the Philippines is on an important journey: to become a great retail bank and the goto financial institution for Filipinos everywhere.

Embracing digital and technological innovation is core to that journey – and is one that UnionBank excels at.

One of the standout features is that UnionBank has used its excellence in digital banking to advocate for a group of clients most hit by the Covid-19 pandemic: the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in the country.

In 2021, the bank launched the MSME business banking mobile app, becoming the first bank in the Philippines to bring out an app just for SMEs. This was an important development that truly recognised the need of the hour for MSMEs, which was collecting funds and payments easily from customers.

to submit documents for payments but can input the necessary information online.

UPay saw tremendous growth. The number of merchants using UPay rose a stellar 108% year-onyear in 2022 to 1,737 merchants, before rising further to over 2,000 by April 2023. Gross payments made on UPay soared 548% in 2022 – showing how UnionBank has captured an important part of the Philippines’ client base and accelerated financial inclusion in the country.

Its efforts were recognised by The Digital Banker in its 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards, where UnionBank won the Best Smart Payments Solution by an SME Bank award.

PEOPLE BUSINESS To solve for that problem, UnionBank unveiled a feature called UPay for MSMEs, which allows businesses to collect payments easily via a link or a QR code. MSMEs also do not need to visit a branch 54

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It goes without saying that despite all the advancements made through digital channels, banking is still very much a people business.

UnionBank has grasped that too, which is why Therese Chan, Director, Head of Wealth Management and Brokerage, took The Digital Banker award for Retail Banker of the Year – Philippines.

Chan gets credit for playing a pivotal role in the migration of Citi’s clients and employees to UnionBank, following the Philippine bank’s acquisition of Citi’s consumer business in 2022. She was proactive in shifting UnionBank’s sales scorecards to ensure the sales team saw value in getting consent from Citi’s clients to migrate over to UnionBank over a threemonth period. Chan drove constant communication with clients, regulators and employees, and helped create promotions and programmes to ensure client focus was sustained.

Citigold/Elite clients in 2022, and now handles a portfolio of close to 300 Citigold/Elite clients with combined assets of roughly USD135.6 million.

His strengths were his patience in dealing with client questions, providing insightful portfolio analysis and advice and offering them a high-quality customer experience. His abilities mean Dy has fast become the go-to relationship manager for the bank’s high net worth client base – an achievement that deserves recognition.

Her ability to manage employee concerns, while focusing on the client experience, was instrumental in delivering a 65% year-on-year jump in the number of new-to-bank high net worth clients, an impressive feat amid the changes.

RELATIONSHIP MANAGER SUPPORT Another stellar UnionBank employee is Justin Dy, Vice President, Senior Relationship Manager, who was named the Best Relationship Manager of the Year by The Digital Banker.

Dy helped generate total revenues of Php21.5 million for the bank. He helped UnionBank acquire 27 new

Best Smart Payments Solution by an SME Bank received by Dino Velasco IV, UnionBank Institutional Segment Marketing Head with Best Relationship Manager of the Year – Justin Dy, Retail Banker of the Year – Philippines – Therese Chan 55

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Arttha Propels Digital Lending across Emerging Markets PureSoftware’s flagship Banking-as-a-Service platform, Arttha, is revolutionizing the digital lending landscape for global banks in Africa and the APAC region. It offers financial institutions a way to streamline lending throughout its entire lifecycle by introducing innovative loan products, making better-informed credit decisions, effectively mitigating risks, and providing a digital-first loan origination experience for their customers.

The importance and potential of digital lending cannot be understated. According to Research and Markets, the global digital lending platform market is poised to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 20% to surpass USD 27 billion by 2027.

Naturally, having a platform that combines cuttingedge technology and robust features with a keen understanding of the evolving needs of the lending industry is essential.

PureSoftware, a leading global software products and digital services company, hits the mark with its flagship banking-as-a-service platform, Arttha.

The premise of Arttha is to empower banks and financial institutions to enhance the overall user

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experience for their customers through cloud-native propositions, such as Core Banking, Loan Lifecycle Management, E-wallet, Digital Payments, SME Banking, and Buy Now Pay Later offerings. Arttha’s no-code-based configurable user interface allows banks to easily create personalized and intuitive customer banking experiences.

Established in 2005, PureSoftware operates across 11 countries, delivering platforms and digital engineering services to transform customers’ lives across multiple industry verticals. Its cloud-native digital banking platform, Arttha, unveiled in 2012, stands out for the role it plays in driving financial innovation for leading global banks across Asia Pacific and Africa.

TRANSFORMING THE LENDING BUSINESS Arttha’s Lending module is a transformative solution for tier-1 banks grappling with the challenges of innovation while burdened by legacy systems.

Similarly, it offers a valuable option for smaller financial institutions seeking a streamlined and costeffective Software as a Service (SaaS) proposition.

Global banks have successfully leveraged Arttha to digitize their entire loan lifecycle, spanning from origination and loan management to processing, disbursement, repayment, and closure. This comprehensive digitization has empowered these institutions to boost their Annual Transaction Volume (ATV), seamlessly onboard new customers, and effectively manage traditional operational costs.

The microservices-based architecture enables banks to deploy customized solutions tailored to their specific needs. This not only streamlines existing lending processes but also empowers technology teams to swiftly launch new user journeys and loan products to the market. This agility benefits both retail and business customers, allowing for a quicker response to evolving market demands.

With Arttha’s dynamic form builder, banks can effectively create customer onboarding forms specific to their end customer segments as well as product profiles. This provides individual and business customers with an intuitive interface where they can provide their details, upload documents, and be assigned credit limits for an omni-channel loan onboarding experience.

The completely configurable product management layer allows product managers to effortlessly create new loan products as per the needs of their customer segments. This helps make the loan journey more seamless and helps banks increase the

overall loan book without extending the risk profile.

Arttha’s other cutting-edge propositions, including e-wallets, digital payments, and merchant management, reimagine banking experiences as they cater to over 150 million customers globally and achieve concurrent transaction speeds of over 1200 TPS (transactions per second) at peak.

ARTTHA MAKES AN IMPACT IN AFRICA Across Africa, Arttha is enabling large banks and fintechs to offer tailor-made Consumer and SME lending solutions for their customers.

In a traditionally underbanked segment, these institutions have been able to introduce innovative products with a dynamic credit decisioning engine to offer solutions including personal loans as well as working capital, invoice financing, and BNPL (buy now pay later) products. This Arttha initiative has helped more than 10 million people get straight through digital access to financial products, with an average of 200,000 loans processed monthly.

It has been these journeys powered by a fully integrated and cloud-ready platform, strong partnerships, and growing customer support that led to PureSoftware being awarded the esteemed ‘Best Digital Lending Solution’ award for Arttha at The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards.

With a product roadmap firmly rooted in innovation and an understanding of local nuances, PureSoftware has expanded its reach with teams and partners across North America, Europe, and the Middle-East to introduce the platform and success stories from its current regions to financial institutions globally.

Given its success so far, its ambitions are well within reach.

Arttha by PureSoftware is a cloud native digital banking platform that successfully enables institutions to digitize their complete loan lifecycle on an end-to-end basis. Importantly, it is helping drive financial inclusion empowering digital banks to increase their annual transaction volume (ATV), onboard new customers and control costs.

— Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards 2023 Judging Panel

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Why SCB TechX’s ISO Gateway project will bring big changes to bank transactions

SCB TechX has ushered in change to the process of fund transfers and payments between banks, a move that will cut costs, reduce the risk of errors and boost efficiency and scale. It’s a win-win for not just the group but also for financial markets.

SCB TechX has a bold vision: to spearhead technology innovation across Southeast Asia to meet the needs and goals of businesses and organisations.

By leveraging its innovative strategy, SCB TechX wants to make technology accessible and secure, and in turn help fuel growth at businesses and make a foray into new market segments.

when digital channels have increasingly become the main mode of banking.

PIVOTAL OFFERINGS

Its goal is anything but lofty given its credentials and ownership. SCB TechX was established through a partnership between SCBX, the mothership of the financial technology business group in Thailand, and Publicis Sapient, a leader in digital transformation consulting. SCB TechX combines the deep banking and domain knowledge of SCBX with the digital expertise of Publicis, making for a robust proposition.

SCB TechX had an important 2022 as it put its efforts into bringing several pivotal products to its client base. One of that was bolstering its digital know-your-customer services by putting in place new features. This included liveness and facial recognition with an identity card, and making transaction authentication effortless for customers but with added levels of security implemented. SCB TechX also has a platform that uses national digital identity authentication to allow completely digital account opening and lending.

That unique blend of capabilities means SCB TechX is at the forefront of delivering a frictionless and omnichannel banking experience to clients at a time

Its data platform is a big hit too as it facilitates the integration, management, storage and administration of diverse data types on one platform.

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But the icing on the cake is SCB TechX’s ISO Gateway, a project launched in mid-2022 and which had its full official launch in 2023.

The ISO Gateway is a system meticulously designed and developed to serve as a crucial intermediary connecting banks with the Interbank Transaction Management and Exchange (ITMX). This innovative system can support over 20 million financial transactions daily, offering seamless integration through Microservices Architecture. It incorporates Open-Source technology, enabling comprehensive expense management and efficient maintenance, including a robust monitoring feature that efficiently covers every connection.

In The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards, SCB TechX won the award for Best Omnichannel Integration in a nod to its ISO Gateway project.

FUTURE OF E-KYC It additionally got a Highly Acclaimed award for Best e-KYC, thanks to the way it has transformed the

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traditional know-your-customer process by enabling users to verify their identity from anywhere.

SCB TechX’s e-KYC solution was rolled out publicly in October 2022 and has got solid traction since.

he number of new-to-bank and existing users T opening online accounts jumped

45.8% between December 2022 and June 2023, ith the bank expected to save THB30 million w annually due to the switch to e-KYC processes.

The belief is that the trend of user verification and identification digitally will continue to gain ground, with processes like digital wallets and insurance policies also eventually done through e-KYC. SCB TechX will be ready to offer its services.

For more information on SCB TechX’s products and services, please visit https://www.scbtechx.io/ or email contact@scbtechx.io

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UOB puts ESG strategy and digital expertise front and centre It’s become clear in recent years that UOB has doubled down on environmental, social and governance initiatives and bolstered its digital capabilities in response to client needs and behaviour. Its efforts to stand by its clients, in good times and bad, deserve recognition.

Singaporean bank UOB’s tagline of doing ‘right by you’ certainly resonates with clients in this day and age. After all, people in the city-state and around the world have had to contend with an unprecedented health crisis, a high interest rate environment putting pressure on the wallet and a rapidly changing financial and banking world over the past few years.

So having a bank that is committed to fuelling your success, doing right by you and building you a better and brighter tomorrow is certainly appealing.

It helps that UOB’s credentials and track record are nothing but strong. With a history of nearly nine decades, the Singapore-headquartered bank is a dominant player in Asean and China and boasts a global network of 500 offices in 19 countries and territories around the world.

It’s also among the world’s top-rated banks – thanks to double-A ratings from all the three major ratings agencies – and is often viewed as among the safest financial institutions globally.

UOB has long maintained four strategic focus areas: create personalised financial solutions for clients through an omnichannel approach, help customers grow sustainably and integrate sustainability into its own business, connect customers in Asean with Greater China and the rest of the world, and foster a culture of care, growth and trust among employees.

Over the years, it has easily made its mark in financial circles, and in 2023 took three awards from The Digital Banker in its Global Retail Banking

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Innovation Awards: Best ESG Initiative, Best Data Analytics Initiative, and Outstanding Use of Advance Analytics – Singapore.

POWERFUL SUSTAINABILITY AGENDA Sustainability has long been UOB’s priority, for which it works alongside customers, colleagues and partners to forge a sustainable future. That is evident in the suite of green-linked products it provides its customers across personal banking, wealth banking and privilege banking.

Take the UOB Go Green home loan, whereby the bank provides the financing to help clients purchase a sustainable residential property in Singapore. It has bolstered this initiative by offering shopping gift cards that clients can use to buy environmentalfriendly household items, as well as discounts on U-Solar packages so clients can switch to solar energy for their homes in a cost-efficient way.

Another UOB proposition is the Go Green car loan to support clients looking to buy electric vehicles.

With the UOB Go Green Car loan, consumers enjoy free charging benefits to support EV adoption and the bank rewards customers with three Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to encourage consumers to embrace greener living and align with the go green initiatives of the government roadmap.

UOB is also behind Southeast Asia’s first bio-sourced

credit card, which offers customers a host of perks like 8% cashback on online and mobile contactless spends, up to 50% discounts at specific merchants and a way to offset all of a client’s electricity consumption through the Singapore Power digital app. Called the EVOL credit card, its usage of 84% plant-based Polylactic Acid (PLA) card material made from non-edible corn reduces the use of petroleumbased plastics by 4.48 and produces 10g less carbon footprint for every card.

From an investment perspective, UOB provides access to a variety of high-quality sustainable bonds as well as mutual funds including that of Allianz, Robeco, Schroders and BlackRock.

What’s notable about UOB is that its ESG focus is not limited just to the environmental aspects. It has also put in efforts on the social and governance fronts, with a particular focus on enriching its own employees and arming them with skills they will need now and in the future.

Yes, digital upskilling and reskilling is big at UOB, and is executed through an initiative called Better U. It was initially focused on helping employees with five core competencies: growth mindset, problem-solving, digital awareness, human-centred design and data storytelling. But this has since been extended to also cover effective communication, building an executive presence, owning their careers and sustainability. By May 2023, more than 18,000 employees had benefitted from the Better U programmes – a win-win for UOB, its employees and for the Singapore economy.

DATA ANALYTICS SUCCESS As a pivotal part of Singapore’s financial sector, UOB takes pride in its desire to improve customers’ branch experience. Before, the bank used to gather customer feedback through traditional channels, such as hardcopy forms or letters, emails, call centres and periodic surveys. But the sustainability of this model soon came into question, given the lag in receiving feedback, low client response and equally low engagement.

To improve the ease of providing feedback, UOB launched a new Voice of Customers (VoC) approach involving the use of QR codes and dynamic surveys.

All customers need to do is scan a QR code in a UOB branch and rate their experience. From there, the branch receives real-time customer feedback in their dashboard. Through data and text analytics, it can now summarise the entire CX rating, identify areas for improvement, as well as maintain strong metrics.

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This novel technique was derived by working with partners to develop dynamic surveys that pose questions based on customers’ responses. This way, UOB gets the real voice of the customers, in real time, and adjusted to a client’s specific context and issues. Branch customers are appreciative, with UOB seeing a spike in customer engagement levels versus traditional feedback tools.

Importantly, the quality of responses is growing, with clients more willing to leave qualitative feedback that UOB staffers can analyse and improve on – reinforcing its award for the Best Data Analytics Initiative.

UOB TMRW DELIVERS BIG For a case study of the outstanding use of advanced analytics, one needs to look no further than UOB TMRW, an all-in-one banking app for the digital generation, offering smart and simple solutions to help customers stay one step ahead of their finances. UOB TMRW features everything from artificial intelligence-driven insights and rewards personalisation to mobile foreign exchange currency conversions, digital investments and cash-free payment options.

Its reach is impressive. UOB delivers roughly 120 million personalised insights every year via UOB TMRW across the ASEAN region. But notably, the team of bankers is constantly innovating, to ensure UOB TMRW remains the go-to app for customers.

One big innovation in 2022 was the June launch of the Insights Analytics Engine across Singapore and Malaysia, with the objective to examine large volumes of feedback and extract findings that can help uncover customer patterns. Through the engine, the UOB team is able to receive relevant data points that they can take action on in real time.

The Insights Analytics Engine is unique because it can review verbatim feedback, identify the positive or negative sentiment behind the feedback based on a semantic analysis of the words used, and draw out common themes. Had the Insights Analytics Engine not been implemented, reviewing the breadth and depth of verbatim feedback provided would likely have required hundreds of hours – making it a great example of the power of advanced analytics to enhance the quality and content of insights served to customers.

This overarching commitment to everything from ESG to digitalisation makes UOB a shining example of a digitally driven bank that is pulling out all the stops to do right by its customers.

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW GABRIEL LAZARO

Senior Vice President, Head of Digital for Overseas General Insurance, Chubb

Our approach to B2B2C partnerships is built on a combination of art, science and technology with a deep understanding of CX and PX needs and expectations.

API integrations can be a dauting task for developers, and speed-to-market is always a top priority. During hundreds of integrations and collaborations, we listened, learned, adopted, and further enhanced Chubb Studio to expand Chubb Studio’s tech engineering capabilities to make integration easier and faster.

The vision is to provide a market-leading experience for not just our partners’ customers, but also our partners’ technical teams.

TDB: How will this platform address developer needs and facilitate your global network partners?

TDB: What was the thinking behind the launch of the new B2B2C Developer Portal by Chubb Studio?

GL: Chubb Studio is our digital insurance integration platform that has powered our B2B2C distribution partnerships with leading companies since its debut in 2020. Our tech capabilities and end-to-end approach get us in the door and at the table with prospective partners, but we’ve learned that it’s the partner experience (PX) that wins the alliance.

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GL: Chubb Studio’s new portal allows developers to explore an extensive portfolio of digital insurance APIs, mobile software development kits (SDKs) and microsites, as well as API documentation and platform architecture with a robust sandbox testing environment.

It significantly streamlines the integration process for developers across several stages of the process, including: • Onboarding Stage: The portal provides an intuitive partner onboarding experience, with access to dashboards, integration documentation and other tools.

• Development Stage: It allows developers to explore an extensive portfolio of digital insurance APIs, mobile SDKs and microsites.

• Implementation Stage: Developers can use the portal to build new digital insurance campaigns and test their applications against a partner’s live APIs, in real time.

TDB: What impact will this likely have on potential embedded insurance opportunities?

GL: Our partners’ technology teams move fast and need centralized access to insurance propositions across verticals, products and geographies, along with comprehensive documentation on lifecycle APIs. This expanded access will help companies to discover customizable solutions that meet their customers’ insurance protection needs, with a CX and PX that exceeds expectations.

The new portal delivers solutions aligned with customer needs based on different industry sectors, such as banks, FinTechs, e-commerce, gig and the sharing economy, luxury, telcos, payments, travel and utilities, with APIs spanning the full insurance

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lifecycle from discovery to pricing to sale and claims.

TDB: What can we come to expect from Chubb Studio in 2024 and beyond?

GL: Our approach to B2B2C partnerships is built on a combination of art, science and technology with a deep understanding of CX and PX needs and expectations We are accelerating innovation by evaluating emerging concepts and technology, utilizing data, analytics, AI and machine learning to determine how it benefits customers and helps scale our business.

Chubb has expanded its digital distribution network to about 200 B2B2C partners globally with over 25 million policies in force derived through these digital partnerships.

We have seen strong interest in Asia and Latin America and are growing quickly in Europe and North America.

Chubb continues to invest in and expand the technological capabilities of its partnership integration platform, to provide a marketleading experience for customers as well as its partners and their technical teams.

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UOB takes standards control up a notch with Project Honeycomb Safeguarding reputation and bringing long-term value to stakeholders are critical elements of any bank’s operations. UOB has given this new meaning in the past year through Project Honeycomb, a data-driven product to analyse a relationship manager’s conduct and standards, identify issues – and take early measures to ensure a long-term sustainable business.

UOB’s Project Honeycomb is the result of a collaboration between the bank’s retail business risk and control management team, and the data management office, aimed at conducting risk surveillance and management.

The idea is to leverage data analytics to provide a timely and holistic view of how a relationship manager conducts himself and his business over the course of the wealth sales and customer relationship management journey. Honeycomb allows for predictive conduct risk management to support proactive early intervention by the risk managers, tightened supervision and target coaching, as well as thematic deep dives into systemic observations around behaviour and work ethic.

The result? A desirable risk culture within the bank’s sales platform and customer experience, which will in turn protect UOB’s reputation and bring long-term value to its shareholders.

But Honeycomb, which was unveiled in October 2022, doesn’t stop there. Its proposition gets a further fillip because it was developed by some exemplary ex-relationship managers, and is built for today’s relationship managers based on the belief that a good relationship manager upholds UOB’s values of being honourable, enterprising, united and committed.

This means the metrics used by Honeycomb and the scoring it provides managers is determined by those with first-hand experience in the market.

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BIG AMBITIONS The development is certainly a landmark both in the fields of technology and risk management, and rightly won The Digital Banker award for Best Data Analytics Initiative – Singapore in the 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards.

Honeycomb works by drawing insights on a relationship manager’s quality of work by analysing the way he conducts himself – captured through incidents data based on the bank’s policies, guidelines and code of conduct – and overlaying that with the types and volumes of transactions he has executed.

Armed with this information, Honeycomb is able to uncover trends and patterns to weed out any improper conduct, making for a predictive approach to risk management.

The success of Honeycomb means the UOB management has big plans for the product. Full adoption of Honeycomb in the bank’s sales platform is in the plans for 2024, as is the addition of new metrics and scenarios to enhance Honeycomb’s profiling of relation managers.

UOB has also set sights on large scale adoption of Honeycomb with the aim to make it a cornerstone of its conduct surveillance programme – an approach that will only make the bank even more stable and resilient in the long term.

EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES UOB took another award in The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards: the Best Retail Bank for Employee Experience.

As a leading back in Asia, UOB certainly takes employee happiness seriously. As part of its people strategy, UOB Group’s Channels and Digitalisation (GCD) team focuses on attracting the right talent and retaining them for the long haul. This has involved refreshing its job portal to make diverse hires, leveraging digital assessment tools like Pymetrics assessment and improving the way competence interviews are conducted. This is combined with behavioural science to ensure employees are embedded well into UOB’s culture, and mentorship programmes that help new hires adapt to the working environment.

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Such initiatives and more are paying off. The GCD’s 2022 employee engagement score rose to 88% – 8% higher than in 2019 and a significant jump from the 70% score in 2017. Attrition rates among employees who have been with UOB for fewer than 12 months reduced by 50% in the 2023 first quarter versus the same period in 2022.

This goes to show that UOB’s commitment to creating a great employee experience – while tightening standards and ensuring its long-term health – have not only set new industry benchmarks but have also cemented the bank’s credentials as a leader in the financial industry.

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UOB connects retail banking prowess with regional ambitions for big success UOB’s retail banking franchise in Singapore and in the rest of Southeast Asia is on the cusp of big transformation after its successful acquisition of Citi’s consumer banking assets in some of the region’s key markets. The move adds fuel to UOB’s already strong firepower in Asean – and will be critical in helping the bank leap forward faster.

UOB had a pivotal 2022: it sharpened its purpose to be the bank that will build the future of ASEAN for people and businesses in the region. To achieve its objective – and to spur a shift in the external perception of the UOB brand – the bank decided to implement an omni-channel approach to personalise the banking experience for clients and bolster its business further through strategic acquisitions.

It has certainly made big strides. In 2022, UOB’s gross revenue stayed above S$1 billion, its total billings from the southeast Asian region soared 26% year-on-year, its balance sheet showed growth with an 11% rise in deposits and a 5% rise in customer loans, while its cost-to-income ratio stayed steady at 34%.

Across the franchise, UOB boasted net client growth of an impressive 35%.

The bank’s reach, credentials and retail banking presence are second to none. One example is its leadership in the cards segment. In Singapore, UOB is the leading Visa cards issuer for personal clients – with an over 27% share of the market – and a leader in commercial cards with a 49% market share.

The reason one of two cardholders in Singapore use UOB cards is down to the bank’s ability to innovate and forge partnerships with other market leaders across sectors. For instance, UOB’s ties with leading

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aircraft carrier Singapore Airlines and e-commerce major Shopee hold plenty of appeal to Singaporeans looking to save costs, get cashback and earn miles on their purchases.

From a savings point of view, UOB’s One Account offers hefty interest rates of 7.8% per annum with a minimum spend of SGD 500 on eligible cards and salary credits, with women offered free cancer coverage of up to SGD 200,000 via the Lady’s Savings Account.

Thanks to such perks and more, UOB was recognised

by The Digital Banker in its 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards as the Best Retail Bank in Singapore.

SOUTHEAST ASIAN POWERHOUSE But UOB’s strengths and capabilities are not limited to just Singapore. It’s broader Southeast Asia offerings – which were given a fillip with the acquisition of Citi’s retail business in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam – meant UOB also took home the award for Best Retail Bank – Southeast Asia.

The Citi acquisition is particularly important and really shows UOB’s ambitions in the region. The purchase gives UOB immediate scale in these

markets, doubles its retail client base to roughly 5.3 million, and accelerates its regional ambitions by five years. It also provides the bank with new partnership opportunities, including with the Michelin Guide in Malaysia and Thailand – giving cardholders exclusive invitations to private dinners and gala events – and with luxury fashion purveyor Club21, which offers cardholders exclusive access to celebrity brands and seasonal fashion events.

Beyond that, UOB has continued to show its commitment to tailoring wealth solutions for every customer’s unique preference, be it through online self-serve or offline relationship manager-assisted advisory, across Asean.

his approach is paying off heaps. In Malaysia, T UOB’s billings rose

14% year on year in the first quarter of 2023, while new cards increased by 52%.

Meanwhile, UOB Indonesia managed to book a 16.5% jump in assets under management in 2022, while the number of wealth clients soared 9.1% from 2021.

UOB has also leveraged its digital bank TMRW to bring a range of products to clients, including Buy Now Pay Later options while traveling, Click for Cash to allow customers to borrow half of their available credit lines through the TMRW app, and AutoSave, a first-of-its-kind feature in Indonesia to help customers save more effortlessly.

When it comes to cutting-edge innovation and strong regional ambitions, UOB leads the way – making it an exemplary retail banking franchise in Singapore and beyond.

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW MILA BEDRENETS Chief Growth Hacker, Tonik

It is very crucial to establish our connection to the financial infrastructure of the Philippines via important key partnerships.”

TDB: In June of 2023, Tonik announced that it had crossed the 1 million customer mark. Please give us an update on the key milestones achieved by the business since launch in March of 2021.

MB: a) In just one month after the launch, we crossed PHP 1 billion in deposits thus proving the point that Filipinos are ready to engage with the concept of a digitalonly bank, and avail higher interest rates compared to legacy banks. We were the first to give 6% p.a. interest, and we are happy to say that we were the ones to shake the market – forcing our competition to increase the deposit

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interest rates in favour of ordinary Filipinos. This is something that we really love to take credit for and communicate to our customers.

b) Tonik was also the first one to launch cash loan product among all digital banks.

We believe that access to credit is one of the biggest challenges for unbanked people, so launching a quick, simple, and comprehensive cash loan was truly relevant to our mission of financial inclusion, and we did it in the end of 2021.

c) By the end of 2022, Tonik launched Shop Instalment Loan which to date is reaching almost 200 store activations. This was a big milestone for us because this is bringing a digital-only bank on the ground to interact with actual customers via our sales promoters while still maintaining the fast and agile processing of loans in our app.

d) We have raised USD 131 million in the series B funding led by the leading Japanese bank, Mizuho Bank.

e) We also launched a secured SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) loan in October this year, which was a big step for a digital bank. Access to credit for SME companies is extremely important

for the economy as countries such as the Philippines still have plenty of entrepreneurs struggling to prove to traditional banks their credit history and cash flow. Implementing the world practice of collateralized loans for SME was not easy for a digital-only bank, but we made it happen.

TDB: How important is strategic collaboration with different partners, for Tonik, in terms of its growth story and commitment to innovation in its product portfolio?

MB: As you know, Tonik is an independent digital bank, the biggest independent bank out of all the six (6) digital banks in the country. Most of our competitors have huge conglomerates and established market players behind them, so for the underdog like Tonik – it is very crucial to establish our connection to the financial infrastructure of the Philippines via important key partnerships. Partnerships enable us in the areas where others might have an advantage by being part of bigger company, bank, or group. Thus, partnerships are extremely important for us. Our biggest partnerships this year were Sunlife Grepa for insurance cross-sell, FC Home, Automatic Center as well as Home Along retail networks for promotion of our shop installment loan; on the group level we partnered with salary benefits company called Tendopay.

TDB: Tell us how the business has inculcated Voice of the Customer (VOC) to continually elevate its digital CX. MB: We are immensely proud to get The Philippines “Best Customer Service 2023” award, and this is something that we care about the most because it reflects the whole different nature of our company. Being very horizontal, agile, young, and dynamic, Tonik does extra effort and goes the extra mile to keep actual customer`s feedback as close to the decision-making level as possible. Voice of customer is not some department buried deep down in the corporate structure – it is our very culture and our values that is spread all over the company – and those are not just words. We have a special crossfunctional working group that include Management Committee members where customers issues are escalated, discussed, and resolved so fast that no traditional bank can dream of. Social media team has direct access to IT, and customer service

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team is 24/7 in touch with product team so everyone will be on the same page regarding the changes, anticipate impact on customer experience, and inform customers and manage their expectations. We are the only bank that immediately gives that many advisories on this or that partners experiencing downtimes to warn customers.

Banking infrastructure is complex so there are a lot of players involved, and each downtime can cause a hiccup and affect the customer experience. We cannot change the reliability of the interbank infrastructure because it is not with us, but the best thing that we can do is to navigate our customers through it.

TDB: What have been the most significant challenges or barriers in driving financial inclusion in the Philippines? Is it a trust or credibility issue?

MB: This is the ID. The biggest struggle digital banks have on their way to bank the unbanked is proper KYC (Know your customer) procedure. Following strict BSP (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas) regulations we need to establish the identity of the customer and there is only limited number of IDs accepted by the BSP, and customers not always possess those. Additionally, with the limited number of IDs accepted, there is also an extremely limited way to verify these documents. So BSP regulated digital banks just literally cannot open the accounts to those Filipinos who do not have proper ID and there are a lot of them.

What should be done for the financial inclusion is unified ID for all Filipinos that is reflected and organized through a government database that should also be available for financial institutions via API for automated verification. I honestly believe that this is the biggest step towards financial inclusion that can be done in Philippines.

Comprehensive credit bureau is also a particularly important part of the unbanked population’s financial inclusion. And it should be mandatory for all institutions that are giving loans to the customer, be that traditional bank, digital bank, lending app or wallet. One centralized easy access is available for every player for easy integration so everyone on the market can both send the data on the customers’ repayments as well as check them. Without

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proper credit records unbanked customers are forced to take out predatory pay day loans instead of going to digital bank for much cheaper financing.

And as to the credibility and trust issues – this is something that comes from some institutions taking security issues to light.

In Tonik we do not rely much on customer education because to us this is just transferring responsibility from financial player to customer. While when we are talking about unbanked Filipinos it would be strange to expect from them to suddenly become financial savvy, prudent and smart in managing their money online. This should be the responsibility of the bank or lending app to ensure hack and scam proof access to funds like we did in Tonik. Due to the packed with different automated verifications onboarding and login journey there is zero chance for someone else to get access to Tonik customers funds after the account is open. I will not share the details, but we used to describe it that we want hackers to get tired of trying and cry.

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TDB: Finally, any advice or guidance for new start-ups in the region looking to build their own digital finance platforms or ecosystems.

What should be their top-of-mind consideration based on your experience with launching Tonik?

MB: D o not go big from the beginning, save money, validate the hypothesis, start from smaller MVPs of your product, and never scale up before you reach and prove profitability model. Before you launch the product know very well how you will earn money with it. There are so many nice services you can offer customers, but not necessarily customers are willing to pay for enough to cover your huge infrastructure and development investments. Or there can be too small market of those customers. Way too many fintech start-ups in the world failed due to running out of money and not being able to raise next funding because their product was too raw and not yet proven by the market. Choose your small sandbox to pilot, do not go all big from the start and always have at least 1 year of cash runway in front of you.

EastWest puts employees at the heart of its business

East West Banking Corporation has proven to be a strong force in the Philippines’ financial sector. But this is not only for its expansive network and its broad reach in the country. It’s also for its commitment to the welfare of its most important asset – its people – and the effort it has put to fostering a culture that leads to its success.

As one of the Philippines’ largest universal banks, East West Banking Corporation has multiple customer touchpoints in the nation: a network of 468 branches and nearly 600 ATMs, as well as a top-notch mobile banking platform for individuals and businesses.

And with some 7,250 full-time employees across the group, EastWest has realised one very important – and often elusive – thing: that to focus on the welfare of its employees is not only the right thing to do, but it also makes good business sense.

detection and prevention of breast cancer, which affects three in every 100 women in the Philippines.

Given women comprise 66% of EastWest’s total workforce – including nearly half of its board of directors and a third of its senior leaders – it’s only fitting that the bank throws its support behind an essential campaign: raising awareness on the

The Magenta Race was a success. Thanks to the participation of 145 employees, EastWest was able to raise roughly Php380,000, all of which was donated to the breast care foundation and earmarked to provide free mammograms and ultrasound check-ups.

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In partnership with the Philippine Foundation for Breast Care Inc, EastWest launched its first Magenta Race in 2022. The race – which was built as a virtual run, walk or cycling for breast cancer – was given the darker magenta tag as opposed to the standard light pink colour associated with breast cancer to reflect the bank’s deeper commitment to the cause.

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That was just one way by which EastWest – which is a subsidiary of banking-to-real estate conglomerate Filinvest Development Corporation – decided to champion breast cancer awareness as part of its corporate social responsibility. It also partnered with MediCard to educate employees about breast cancer and its prevention, and held webinars aimed at answering queries about the disease. It additionally conducted a month-long series of breast health checkups for all its employees across the bank’s corporate centres and select stores as part of its health and wellness programme.

Unsurprisingly, EastWest was given the Best CSR Initiative award by The Digital Banker in its 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards.

EMPLOYEE EXCELLENCE Away from breast cancer awareness, EastWest’s internal employee initiatives are solid. Employee promotions are based on job content, scope and the candidate’s calibre, and emphasise equal opportunity and career advancements based on performance, not gender or other bias-related factors.

Competitive salaries and benefit packages, continuous investments into talent development, succession planning to ensure talented employees can advance to new and important roles and zero tolerance for discrimination and corruption are all in sharp focus at EastWest.

This meant that in 2022, EastWest made 777 promotions – equal to 13% of its workforce – conducted over 364,000 hours of training and welcomed 71 graduates from the retail banking development programme and seven from the corporate banking group’s account officer development programme.

It also onboarded 33 senior officers, added a psychological test as part of its applicant evaluation tool and boosted the use of job boards like LinkedIn and Jobstreet to attract the best and most diverse talent possible to its workforce.

EastWest’s belief that taking care of its employees also makes good business sense is reflected in its performance. The Bank’s net income rose 2.4% yearon-year to Php4.6 billion in 2022, while its asset base

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jumped 4.1% to Php421.3 billion. EastWest’s costto-income ratio was lower at 60.2% in 2022 versus 61.2% the year before. In line with its objective to be the consumer bank of choice in the Philippines, EastWest’s credit card receivables soared 24% in 2022 and it deployed 73% of its total loans to the consumer segment.

That momentum continued into 2023. EastWest posted a net income of Php4.9 billion in the first nine months of 2023, exceeding the 2022 fullyear net income, while revenues jumped

26% year-on-year to Php25.6 billion.

Return on equity surged to 10.3%, while the Bank’s total assets, total loans and receivables, and total deposits all showed solid growth.

CHARTING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE Like many of its peers in the Philippines and globally, EastWest has made the economic, environmental, social and governance (EESG) elements of its operations an important focus area.

The Bank identifies and addresses potential risks in its business and carries out initiatives with a positive impact on its stakeholders, on the environment, and on society. As part of that – and in collaboration with parent Filinvest – EastWest put in place a new sustainability framework in 2023 to provide the maximum EESG impact to its business operations.

Whether it’s ensuring taxes are paid on time and EastWest is creating new jobs, or environment housekeeping and compliance, or customer health and well-being, or risk management and maintaining good business ethics, EastWest covers a wide ground on its EESG ambition.

The firm has also realised that trust is core in banking, whether it’s trust within internal employees and stakeholders or retail customers and businesses.

To ensure full transparency, EastWest has a strict corporate governance code in place, ensures consistent shareholder communication and keeps a close eye on the operations of the audit committee,

anti-money laundering checks and insider trading concerns.

BOOSTING DIGITAL OFFERINGS Then there is the core banking business that EastWest excels in. As a leading universal bank in the Southeast Asian country, the firm offers a comprehensive suite of services including savings accounts, a range of credit cards and auto loans, home loans and personal loans.

The credit card solution has gained particular heft.

In the wake of the global pandemic, EastWest relaunched the EastWest Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer Mastercard credit card in November 2022, in time to ride the resurgence in travel. The card offers users miles on their spending, airport lounge access and low foreign currency conversion fees of 1.70% – all of which have proved a hit with customers.

It bolstered its proposition further with the milestone launch in 2023 of EastWest Pay, the first-in-market in-store mobile payment application powered by EastWest Visa credit cards. The cutting-edge platform ensures secure and hassle-free transactions through Android devices, redefining convenience and safety for customers.

As EastWest continues to boost its digital offerings and scales up its business further in the Philippines, there’s no question that its employees will remain a core part of its success story. This will make the bank a real trailblazer as it proves that a commitment to employee welfare can bring numerous benefits – financial success and a strong brand image, but also importantly, a legacy built on principles and long-term positive impact.

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AFFIN BANK’s President & Group CEO steer the Group to greater heights with a three-pronged approach.

Since taking the helm of AFFIN BANK as its President and Group Chief Executive Officer in 2020, Datuk Wan Razly Abdullah has had to navigate big changes: a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic and a complete transformation in the way people bank and transact. He has stepped up to the plate impressively and ensured Affin’s positioning as a leading bank in Malaysia.

AFFIN BANK had a strong 2022. Revenues for the full year were RM3.3 billion, roughly 47% higher than the RM2.2 billion recorded in 2021, while net profits before tax closes to double year on year to RM1.4 billion.

The Bank also posted strong financial ratios, with net return on average shareholders’ fund rising to 11.49%, and the net return on average assets is growing to 1.4%, with drops in the cost-to-income ratio and gross impaired loan ratio.

Credit for that stellar performance goes to AFFIN BANK’s, President & Group CEO, Datuk Wan Razly Abdullah, who took the helm of the Malaysian bank in April 2020 with his first task being to steer the Bank carefully through the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant Datuk Wan Razly Abdullah had to prioritise multiple goals simultaneously, including restructuring the Bank’s balance sheet and shifting the focus from fixed

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deposits to current and savings accounts, as well as amplifying AFFIN’s digital initiatives and finding ways to stay ahead of the competition.

As a forward-thinking President & Group CEO, Datuk Wan Razly Abdullah has prioritised three key areas: ‘Unrivalled Customer Service, Digital Leadership, and Responsible Banking with Impact’.

CUSTOMER IS KING The Bank does that successfully through its newly launched mobile app called AFFIN Always and Mobile Financial Centres, as well as the support from its other entities which include Affin Islamic Bank Berhad, Affin Hwang Investment Bank Berhad and Affin Moneybrokers Sdn Bhd, and associated insurance companies, making it a one-stop centre for clients’ myriad of financial needs.

DIGITAL PROWESS

RESPONSIBLE BANKING

AFFIN is a leader in technological advancements, having embraced innovation and digital transformation to enhance its capabilities and efficiency and to offer the best to its clients. That has involved rolling out features like digital payroll, digital imaging systems, robo-advisory, e-investment options, corporate internet banking systems, and mortgage loan pricing automation.

AFFIN’s third objective, ‘Responsible Banking with Impact,’ stands as a testament to the unwavering commitment of President and Group CEO, Datuk Wan Razly Abdullah to focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) responsibilities. With profound dedication, Datuk Wan Razly Abdullah is seamlessly weaving sustainable practices into the fabric of AFFIN’s operations. His leadership extends beyond the boardroom, as he actively champions initiatives that not only enhance the Bank’s ESG performance but also make a positive and meaningful impact on the community.

One offering stands out for being one of its kind in Malaysia: the Automated Safe Deposit Locker (ASDL), launched in December 2022 and which received the Highly Acclaimed Award for Best Technology Implementation by a Retail Bank in the Digital Banker’s Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards for 2023.

The self-service robotic system, which AFFIN has available in two of its 120 branches, is a revolutionary smart safety storage system that combines the latest and most advanced automated technology with enhanced multi-tiered security verification systems.

Verification is possible through contactless RFID access cards, biometric fingerprint identification, and PIN password and locker keys. This is complemented by the fully automated security that puts all safe deposit lockers in a highly secured modular vault that is monitored by robotic systems.

A key perk: the ASDL is convenient and accessible as the lockers can be accessed for longer operating hours, including during the weekends and public holidays.

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Fully Automated Security powered by Robotic Retrieval of Lockers

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Major focus areas include renewable energy pivot, staff volunteering, corporate social responsibility initiatives donations, planting of trees, staff upskilling, and sustainable financing.

Datuk Wan Razly Abdullah’s visionary leadership has not only transformed AFFIN Group into a modern and progressive bank but has also significantly contributed to the broader sustainability initiatives within the financial landscape in Malaysia and more broadly in South East Asia.

These tireless efforts have catapulted AFFIN Group to the pinnacle of the banking industry, earning the Group’s recognition from Brand Finance, as one of the top three fastest-growing Malaysian brands in 2022.

Additionally, Datuk Wan Razly Abdullah’s exceptional leadership has earned him the prestigious title of ‘CEO of the Year in Malaysia’ from The Digital Banker.

This accolade serves as a resounding testament to his steadfast dedication to professional excellence, his visionary guidance in propelling innovation, and his unwavering commitment to sustainability and further solidifying AFFIN’s position as a trailblazer in the financial landscape.

Durable of Reliable Structure for Ultimate Security

Extended Accessibility Anytime, Any Day

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The Golden Standard: Moody’s and the Future of Compliance In a world where data reigns supreme, Moody’s has been turning information into power. By marshalling a comprehensive suite of entity data and analytics, they have positioned themselves not merely as market participants but as trailblazers. The team’s efforts were acknowledged at the prestigious Global BankTech Awards 2023, organized by The Digital Banker, where they earned top honours as the Best Reference Data Provider, and Best Third-Party Solution by a Vendor.

A nod to these achievements, Nirav Patel, Managing Director of The Digital Banker, remarked, “Moody’s stands out for their unparalleled ability to distill complex data into actionable insights and robust risk solutions. Their commitment to excellence in enriching data for enhanced analytics and their innovative approach to digital transformation has set a new benchmark in the industry, rightly earning them multiple honors at this year’s Global BankTech Awards.”

THE GOLDEN RECORD: ENTITY VERIFICATION AND ONBOARDING EXCELLENCE At the core of modern finance, the ‘golden record’ — a consummate and precise entity profile — is not a mere convenience but a regulatory

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imperative. The uniqueness of this record lies in its encompassing firmographics, reference data, and intricate ownership links, which together facilitate resolute entity verification. Moody’s leverages the comprehensive Orbis database to offer a detailed perspective on corporate entities, complemented by the real-time capabilities of the Kompany KYC API for immediate retrieval of verified company data.

Concurrently, the Grid platform consolidates risk data to present an indepth analysis of the potential financial crime risks linked to politically exposed persons (PEPs) and their extensive networks.

The narrative of ‘efficient & effective customer onboarding’ comes through strongly here. It balances the scales between the rigor of compliance and the ease of customer experience. The digital transformation narrative, including perpetual Know

Your Customer (pKYC) protocols, is carried forward by innovations like Passfort, which intelligently orchestrates customer due diligence workflows in line with prevailing risk policies and regulatory frameworks. Such measures ensure that banks can navigate the complexities of modern finance, fully aware of with whom they do business.

THE CRUX OF FINANCIAL INNOVATION: USE CASES UNPACKED The application of Moody’s solutions manifests vividly across several use cases. To begin with, in the battle against financial crime, the Orbis and Grid platforms reveal the clandestine ties of shell companies. They shine a light on complex ownership structures that otherwise facilitate illicit activities such as money laundering or sanction evasion. As Chua Choon Hong, Senior Director – Head of Financial Crime Practice Group, APAC and Middle East at Moody’s, articulates, “If you have a lot of these shell companies as clients in the financial institutions, the risks of money laundering, sanction evasions and even tax avoidance will increase.”

with the potential for more substantial compliance and strategic growth.

Moody’s thus continues to pave the path for institutions seeking not just to survive but to excel.

By harnessing the power of comprehensive data, advanced analytics, and transformative digital solutions, it crafts a world where compliance, insight, and growth coalesce, heralding a new era of financial intelligence.

Moody’s heralds a shift towards a digitised, automated, and customercentric financial ecosystem.”

Turning to growth strategies, these data-rich solutions aid in the identification of legitimate cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, mapping out customer networks, and unlocking insights into customer behaviour. They help businesses to efficiently engage with existing clients and prospects, fine-tuning sales and marketing efforts with the backing of solid, data-driven intelligence.

In the domain of digital transformation, the story is one of evolution. Moody’s heralds a shift towards a digitised, automated, and customercentric financial ecosystem. The Passfort platform’s forthcoming enhancements epitomise this shift, with its promise of even more seamless automation and localised experiences that cater to a global customer base.

LOOKING AHEAD: A CANVAS OF POSSIBILITIES As the financial sector contends with an everevolving landscape, Moody’s stands at the forefront, poised to deliver innovations that meet the moment.

With integrations that will deepen insights into company ownerships and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk scores, the horizon is bright

CHUA CHOON HONG

Senior Director – Head of Financial Crime Practice Group, APAC and Middle East at Moody’s

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Miles ahead: UOB’s unique debit card soars on KrisFlyer partnership UOB’s goal is to be the best-in-class player in the debit card market. Through innovation and enterprising efforts, KrisFlyer UOB Debit Card, a one-of-a-kind product, was launched, which has leapfrogged competition to remain a firm favourite of customers.

As a bank with a rich heritage and history in Singapore, UOB has to constantly innovate, stay on top of trends and position itself early for opportunities. One product that embodies all these attributes is the KrisFlyer UOB Debit Card, which was awarded the Debit Card of the Year award in The Digital Banker’s 2023 Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards.

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This well-deserved accolade is the crowning achievement of the hallmark product of UOB that was first unveiled in April 2017 before being enhanced in January 2018 and revamped again in November 2022.

The KrisFlyer UOB Debit Card and KrisFlyer UOB Account were conceived with a simple idea: to meet the needs of travellers of any age. To that end, the

KrisFlyer UOB Debit Card and Account was the first of its kind – it was the first debit card in Singapore to award miles on top of interest; it was the first product to offer tiered miles earn rate for deposits; and it was the first card to offer exclusive privileges with co-brand partner KrisFlyer by Singapore Airlines Group.

By identifying that miles are predominantly earned through credit card spending, the KrisFlyer UOB Debit Card and Account enables the bank to meet the needs of the millennial demographic, which are often ineligible to apply for credit cards due to income restrictions. Additionally, clients are also rewarded with a base interest for their balance in the account – appealing to people as it allows them to spend to earn miles, but also save to earn interest.

FIRST MOVER Those offerings proved popular among the Singapore diaspora. But after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, UOB was quick to position itself for the comeback of travel when borders reopened. Recognising the need to give its customers something extra, UOB and KrisFlyer enhanced the benefits of the debit card in November 2022, boosting miles earned on purchases, offering more welcome miles, complimentary upgrades in status as a KrisShopper, as well as a host of other benefits.

Equally importantly, UOB didn’t forget the importance of marketing the refreshed benefits to its cardholders. The bank, in collaboration with KrisFlyer, undertook a large-scale campaign to raise the card’s awareness and uniqueness.

Thanks to these efforts, digital ad impressions were close to 1.3 million over a short period of less than three months, while UOB’s site traffic soared 284% month-on-month in November versus during the pre-launch month of October. New KrisFlyer UOB account applications have increased close to 300% year on year. Card applications exceeded sign-ups by nearly 200% year on year, while UOB’s card billings jumped over 30%.

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STRONG ESG AGENDA UOB was also given the Highly Acclaimed award for the Best ESG Initiative by The Digital Banker.

As an 88-year-old institution, the bank has evolved with time, and has made sustainability a strategic priority in recent years. In line with its Asean growth ambition, UOB’s focus has been to promote sustainable living across the region, provide sustainable wealth advisory and investment offerings, as well as sustainable spending and lifestyle financing options.

This has led to the introduction of many products, like Go Green Home and Car Loans, Southeast Asia’s first bio-sourced credit card, a marketplace to raise awareness of green electricity plans, sustainable investment frameworks across fixed income and equities, and ways to drive sustainable innovation and financial literacy among the population.

This business model shows why customers’ trust in UOB hasn’t dimmed with time. By offering tools for a seamless, secure and rewarding financial experience and by relying on innovation to offer customers financial empowerment, UOB’s proposition remains unmatched.

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How Thought Machine’s Vault Core is Transforming Digital Banking In the world of digital banking, Thought Machine has emerged not only as a formidable innovator but also as an award-winning technology leader, having recently been awarded “Best Core Banking Solution Provider by a Vendor” at the prestigious Global BankTech Awards 2023, organised by The Digital Banker. This accolade is a testament to how Vault Core, Thought Machine’s pioneering core banking engine, is redefining excellence in technology and customer experience, setting new standards and breaking the mould of traditional banking paradigms.

During the awards ceremony, Nirav Patel, Managing Director of The Digital Banker, said, “Thought Machine’s Vault Core has been recognised for its exceptional configurability and its innovative smart contracts model, which collectively have set a new benchmark in core banking solutions. The firm’s ability to empower banks with a truly scalable, cloud-native platform, and dramatically expedite time-to-market for complex banking products, is precisely why they have earned this prestigious recognition.”

RESHAPING CORE BANKING TECHNOLOGY Thought Machine’s success lies its core banking technology, a masterpiece in the re-engineering of how banks operate, manage, and distribute financial products. Vault Core, a cloud-native core banking platform, has been meticulously crafted from the ground up to provide clients with unparalleled control and adaptability. In a recent case study, Mox Bank Limited, a collaboration between Standard Chartered and partners including HKT, PCCW, and Trip.com, exemplifies this transformation. Mox Bank sought out a sophisticated core banking engine with the capability to stand out among its competitors in terms of functionality and usability. The answer was Thought Machine’s Vault Core.

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CONFIGURABILITY AND FLEXIBILITY: THE HALLMARKS OF VAULT CORE Thought Machine distinguishes itself through its hyper-configurability, partnering with financial institutions of varying sizes and complexities.

It addresses the full spectrum of digital transformation needs, from incubating greenfield digital banks to modernising legacy banking platforms, and introducing cutting-edge banking propositions. Powered by Vault Core, Mox Bank’s rise as one of Hong Kong’s fastest-growing banks is a testament to the engine’s flexibility and power.

Vault Core’s cloud-native and configurable nature, coupled with its full API exposure, allowed Mox Bank to integrate best-of-breed technology solutions smoothly, achieving a rapid market launch in just 18 months and attracting 35,000 customers in the first four weeks.

The platform’s strength lies in its adaptability to any cloud configuration, elevating its clients like Mox Bank to new heights. This flexibility ensures that financial institutions can custom-build and manage any financial product through a single platform that undergoes regular upgrades, bolstering their competitive edge.

SMART CONTRACTS: THE FUTURE OF BANKING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Thought Machine’s smart contracts model is a foundation of its of its unique approach, allowing banks to create and tailor any type of product, no matter the complexity. This model accelerates banks’ time-to-market, providing them with a rich library of pre-built smart contracts for a variety of banking products. The Universal Product Engine within Vault Core is noteworthy. It empowers clients to either deploy market-standard products like current accounts, savings, loans, mortgages, and credit cards, or innovate with Islamic banking solutions and novel offerings such as buy-now-pay-later schemes, digital wallets, and offset mortgages.

At the core of Thought Machine’s success lies its core banking technology, a masterpiece in the re-engineering of how banks operate, manage, and distribute financial products – Vault Core.”

This unique approach of defining financial products as code means that banks are no longer reliant on their core banking vendor for changes, fostering independence and agility. Mox Bank’s personalised banking experience, which enables customers to expertly manage and grow their money, is a direct outcome of this innovation. With its microservices architecture, Vault Core guarantees an ultra-reliable, always-on service, a critical asset during peak demands and product launches.

The success stories are compelling. Trust Bank’s CIO, Rajay Rai, praised Vault Core saying, “It is the foundational platform for us to build and grow the first of Singapore’s new wave of digital banks.”

And with industry giants like JPMorgan Chase and Lloyds Banking Group among its clientele, Thought Machine’s impact on the industry is undeniable.

Simply put, Thought Machine’s Vault Core is a trailblazer in the banking sector by offering configurability and its pioneering use of smart contracts. It is a true partner for banking and financial institutions worldwide that wish to embark on a path towards transformational growth, creating an entirely new landscape for digital banking where innovation thrives.

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Pegasystems and the New Era in Client Lifecycle Management Pegasystems Inc., commonly known as Pega, stands out as a leader and exemplar in innovation and efficiency. This recognition is highlighted by its recent win of the Best Client Lifecycle Management Solution by a Vendor at the Global BankTech Awards 2023, organised by The Digital Banker. Established in 1983, Pega has been a consistent frontrunner in providing advanced software solutions. With its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a significant presence across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific, Pega is renowned for its high-end, AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation.

Pega’s robust low-code platform, acclaimed for empowering enterprises to “Build for Change®,” adeptly navigates complex business challenges through a fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated workflows. This innovative approach has not only garnered a multitude of patents and accolades for software innovation but has also earned Pega esteemed industry recognitions, including placements in Chartis, Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center and the Forrester Wave for Digital Process Automation.

Nirav Patel, Managing Director of The Digital Banker, remarked, “Pegasystems’ triumph at the Global BankTech Awards can be attributed to its

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exceptional ability to streamline client lifecycle management, integrating AI and automation in a way that radically transforms customer engagement and operational efficiency. Their pioneering platform and dedication to continuous innovation set a benchmark in the financial technology landscape.”

CLIENT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY IN EXCELLENCE Pega’s Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions, exemplify the company’s commitment to innovation.

Pega CLM transforms client onboarding and lifecycle management, particularly in financial institutions.

By adopting a parallel-driven approach, it reduces

onboarding time by 70 percent and costs by 60 percent, significantly enhancing customer experience.

Pega CLM and Know Your Customer (KYC) includes capabilities to integrate facial recognition and identification, leveraging video identification and advanced biometrics. This feature ensures legal and speedy customer identity verification, aligning with international regulations like eIDAS AML, FATF, FATCA, CRS and GDPR. Pega differentiates itself through its unique value proposition, combining AI-powered decisioning with intelligent automation. Its client lifecycle management solution leverages a center-out architecture. This approach enables dynamic collaboration and rapid adaptation to regulatory changes, a significant advantage in an ever-evolving regulatory landscape.

Functional features of Pega’s centre out architecture are expansive, ranging from omnichannel interfaces to AI, RPA, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities. Its technology architecture, based on the PEGA platform, offers workflow automation for enhanced business agility. The customisation capability, facilitated by low-code solutions, allows businesses to tailor the platform to their specific needs.

DELIVERING TANGIBLE BENEFITS TO FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS A testament to Pega’s impact is the success story of the Bank of Singapore (Bank of SG), a rapidly growing private bank in Asia. The Bank of SG Client Onboarding Lifecycle Management Platform, powered by Pega’s CLM solution, demonstrates significant business impact through its scalable nature, accommodating various business entities efficiently.

The implementation of Pega’s solutions at Bank of SG resulted in a significant reduction in onboarding turnaround time, a testament to the platform’s efficiency and impact. Relationship Managers at Bank of SG lauded the solution for its ease of use and instantaneous approval process.

Looking ahead, Pega continues to innovate, with plans to integrate predictive and adaptive AI capabilities into its Client Onboarding and other activities in 2023 and 2024. The addition of enterprise grade Generative AI was launched this year and has introduced a range of new capabilities, further cementing Pega’s position as a leader in client lifecycle management solutions. There is no question, Pegasystems’ journey from its founding in 1983 to its current position as a global leader in AIpowered decisioning and workflow automation is a story of relentless innovation.

Pega’s robust low-code platform, acclaimed for empowering enterprises to “Build for Change®,” adeptly navigates complex business challenges through a fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and automated workflows.”

Since its launch in 2016, the platform has undergone significant upgrades, including the migration to the latest version in 2022. This upgrade brought advanced features like Cosmos UI and DX API, enriching the platform with out-ofthe-box business rule engines, case management, AI capabilities, and analytics.

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RAKBANK’s Digital Journey from Skiply, the educational mobile app platform, to Quick Apply for SMEs RAKBANK, a leading entity in the financial sector based in UAE, has recently been recognised at the Global BankTech Awards 2023, organised by The Digital Banker, for its exceptional strides in digital banking. The bank’s innovative platform, Quick apply played a vital role in securing awards for Outstanding Digital Innovation in SME Banking, Skiply for Best Pure-Play Digital Initiative, and Digital on-boarding journey for accounts for Excellence in Digital Innovation. This recognition underscores RAKBANK’s unwavering commitment to driving digital transformation in the banking sector.

Nirav Patel, Managing Director of The Digital Banker, lauded RAKBANK’s achievements, stating, “RAKBANK’s success at the Global BankTech Awards is a reflection of its innovative spirit and dedication to customer-centric digital solutions.

Their platforms, like Skiply & Quick apply for SMEs not only streamline processes but also enrich user experiences, setting a new standard in digital banking.” These accolades are a testament to RAKBANK’s role as a digital innovator, seamlessly blending technology with empathy to redefine banking experiences.

Skiply: Redefining UAE’s Educational Payments Landscape Skiply, a proprietary application of RAKBANK, is revolutionising the management of educational payments and activities for families. Serving over 150,000 users and partnering with more than 250 educational institutions, Skiply has established itself as a benchmark in the UAE’s educational sector. The platform adeptly caters to both parents and educational institutions, offering streamlined services such as fee payments, uniform purchases, and real-time notifications. The seamless integration of ERP solutions into Skiply is particularly notable, exemplifying how digital innovations can retain a human touch.

In 2022, the introduction of ERP integration to Skiply marked another significant advancement, enabling digital reconciliation and minimising human errors.

This development is in line with RAKBANK’s vision of a digital-first approach in educational payments, where technological advancement and user-centric design converge.

Advancing Towards Modern Banking Embracing the digital era, RAKBANK has elevated customer convenience with its innovative Digital On-Boarding (DOB) process for individual account openings. This initiative represents a significant departure from the traditional paper-based methods, adopting a digital-first strategy to meet the evolving demands of today’s consumers.

The DOB process ensures a smooth, user- friendly experience, enabling customers to effortlessly open accounts from any location and at any time.

Emphasising a paperless system, this approach not only conserves resources but also aligns with broader goals of environmental sustainability. With features such as automated identity verification, thorough data validation, comprehensive risk assessment, and instant account approval, RAKBANK has positioned itself at the forefront of digital banking innovation.

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The reception of the DOB process by customers has been overwhelmingly positive, with 94% opting for this digital method to open their Current and Savings accounts as of May 2023.

Key benefits of this process include immediate account activation, the provision of virtual debit cards, and the removal of restrictions on funding or transactions, making banking more accessible and convenient than ever before.

Empowering SMEs with Digital Innovation RAKBANK has also made considerable progress in SME banking, offering a comprehensive suite of business banking services. With a strong market presence, particularly in the small and micro sector, RAKBANK stands as a pillar in the UAE’s SME ecosystem.

The bank’s range of services for SMEs includes transactional banking, business finance, insurance, and treasury services, catering to diverse business needs. Notably, RAKBANK has launched the RAKBANK Business App and SMEsouk platform, providing SMEs with digital tools to manage their banking needs effectively and connect with a broader business community.

RAKBANK’s Quick Apply digital loans platform is an innovative step forward, allowing SMEs to apply for business finance digitally and receive instant inprinciple approval. This platform has significantly improved the loan application process, integrating various systems to streamline lead qualification and accelerate loan disbursal.

The benefits for SMEs are manifold, including hassle-free onboarding, paperless processing, and automated credit decisioning. This initiative has led to the disbursement of over AED 200 million in loans digitally, enhancing both customer and sales experiences.

RAKBANK’s journey of digital innovation is marked by significant advancements in educational payments, individual customer onboarding, and SME banking. Through platforms like Skiply, the Digital On-Boarding process, and Quick Apply for SMEs, RAKBANK has demonstrated its commitment to transforming the banking experience, staying ahead in the digital age while maintaining a human touch in its services.

As the bank continues to innovate, it sets new benchmarks in the industry, fostering an environment where technology and customercentricity go hand in hand.

“Through platforms like Skiply, the Digital On-Boarding process, and Quick Apply for SMEs, RAKBANK has demonstrated its commitment to transforming the banking experience.”

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How Mashreq Al Islami Reshapes Islamic Banking in UAE Mashreq stands out as a paragon of innovation in modern banking, especially in digital and Islamic banking services. This excellence was acknowledged at the Middle East & Africa Innovation Awards 2023 organised by The Digital Banker, where Mashreq received multiple prestigious awards. Garnering recognitions such as Best Digital Bank in UAE, Best Hybrid Wealth Management Offering, Best Islamic Retail Bank in UAE, Outstanding Digital Transformation by an Islamic Retail Bank, Best Islamic Loan Offering of the Year, and Best Customer Centric Business Model, Mashreq has solidified its position as a leader in the United Arab Emirates’ banking sector. How Mashreq Al Islami Reshapes Islamic Banking in UAE Since its inception in Dubai in 1967

Since its inception in Dubai in 1967, Mashreq has evolved from modest beginnings to a major force in banking, continuously pushing the boundaries in the digital banking sphere through Mashreq Al Islami, and its array of pioneering services.

Nirav Patel, Managing Director of The Digital Banker, remarked, “Mashreq’s commitment to digital innovation and customer-centric solutions has been outstanding. Their ability to blend advanced technology with a deep understanding of customer

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needs is why they stand out as winners in multiple categories at our awards.”

INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Mashreq’s journey of innovation is marked by several firsts in the UAE banking industry, including the introduction of ATM cash dispensers, the issuance of debit and credit cards, and consumer

loans. The bank’s digital arm, Mashreq Neo, launched in 2017, signifies a leap towards fully digital banking solutions, encompassing everything from account openings and remittances to investments and loans. By 2021, Mashreq Neo merged with Personal Banking, amassing over 900,000 active customers and a liability balance of AED 5.5 billion, with more than 95% of these customers onboarded and serviced digitally.

Under the umbrella of Mashreq Al Islami, the Islamic Banking arm of Mashreq Group, the bank offers a broad spectrum of Sharia-compliant products. These range from Qard based current accounts to Murabaha based Islamic Credit Cards. Each product, whether it’s personal finance solutions, home financing, or investment services, is designed to align with Islamic banking principles while offering competitive advantages in the market.

Mashreq’s commitment to digital transformation is not just a technological advancement but also a response to evolving customer expectations.

The bank boasts a digital banking transaction share of over 96%, a testament to its successful digital integration. This digital push encompasses state-of-the-art mobile and online banking, digital self-service channels, and interactive interfaces, redefining the customer banking experience.

One of the most significant innovations in this domain is the implementation of facial recognition technology for customer onboarding, a first in the UAE’s digital banking sector. This technology not only streamlines the account opening process but also enhances security and reduces the risk of fraud.

DRIVING THE FUTURE OF ISLAMIC DIGITAL BANKING

services. By developing unique platforms and engaging in the fintech and banking as a service (BaaS) ecosystem, the bank is opening up new avenues for customer interaction and satisfaction.

This approach has led to a 20% YoY increase in Mashreq’s retail customer base.

BEYOND BANKING Mashreq’s innovations in digital banking, especially through Mashreq Al Islami, mark a significant transformation in the financial sector. By successfully marrying traditional banking principles with modern technological advancements, Mashreq has not only enhanced the banking experience for its customers but also set a high bar for competitors in the industry. As the bank continues to navigate the digital landscape, its focus on customer-centric solutions and technological innovation positions it to remain at the forefront of the banking revolution in the UAE and beyond.

Mashreq has evolved from modest beginnings to a major force in banking, continuously pushing the boundaries in the digital banking sphere through Mashreq Al Islami, and its array of pioneering services.”

Mashreq Al Islami’s dedication to digital transformation is evident in its comprehensive range of digitally enhanced products and services.

These include digital journeys for credit cards, personal loans, and account openings that are entirely customer-initiated and require no human interaction. The initiative extends to the business banking sector, with digital platforms like Mashreq Al Islami NEO and NEOBIZ reshaping the landscape of business banking.

The strategy behind these initiatives is clear: Mashreq aims to provide experiences, not just

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Stanbic IBTC: Pioneering innovation in transaction banking and cocreating with clients JESUSEUN FATOYINBO

Head, Transaction Banking, Stanbic IBTC Bank

Stanbic IBTC Bank is a wholly owned subsidiary of Stanbic IBTC Holdings, a holding company listed on the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX). Stanbic IBTC Holdings is a 65.35 percent owned subsidiary of Stanbic Africa Holdings UK, which in turn is fully owned by Standard Bank Group.

As of 31 December 2022, the total assets for Stanbic IBTC Bank stood at NGN3.03 trillion (USD7.15 billion) and profit of the year was recorded at NGN80.81 billion (USD190.7 million).

Stanbic IBTC Bank’s range of transactional services includes:  Payments and collections solutions.  Correspondent and settlement banking services.  Escrow services.  Liquidity management solutions.  Trade solutions.  Working capital solutions, short term loans and overdrafts.  Custodial services.  Investor Services.

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A key contributor of the bank’s asset growth and profitability is the Bank’s transactional banking service, which provides its clients with access to a comprehensive suite of cash management, traditional and non-traditional trade offerings, and investor services solutions in Africa and beyond. The bank’s indepth knowledge and experience, enables it to deliver cross-sectional solutions across various clients and sectors.

EMPOWERING CLIENTS ACROSS THE TRADE VALUE CHAIN THROUGH TAILORED PRODUCTS AND CUTTINGEDGE PLATFORM OFFERINGS Part of the transaction banking trade services solution includes the delivery of trade and supply chain finance solutions for corporate and investment banking clients with embedded customisation as needed for traditional trade and non-trade products.

The suite of trade solutions facilitates clients’ businesses by shortening their cash conversion cycle, enabling automated financial reporting and contributing to ease of trade and payments with

various counterparties. The transaction banking business secured 25 new mandates in 2023 while controlling 6 percent of the country’s import LC volumes. The Non-Oil Export Trade business of Transaction Banking is gaining momentum with 21 mandates won valued at USD289million in 2022 2023 period while controlling about 3 percent of the non-oil export market.

Furthermore, the bank has established an International Trade Channel (ITC) that serves as the front-end for trade financing processing. The digital platform is an adaptable and easy to use B2B solution, that serves as a convenient and secure single window for all trade finance activities ranging from account opening to cross-border payments. The deployment of ITC has elevated the digital customer experience for corporate clients especially given the integration of required regulatory documentation.

Currently, ITC is being used by the institution’s clients for processing 70 percent of import LCs.

LEADING CUSTODIAN OF CHOICE LEVERAGING WORLD-CLASS EXPERTISE AND EXPERIENCE SERVING LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL INVESTORS Stanbic IBTC Bank is the pioneering asset servicing provider in Nigeria and currently the largest custodian of non-pension assets in the market.

The bank provides custodial services to both local and international investors leveraging on Standard Bank Group’s custody heritage. Its expertise is in safekeeping, trade settlements, corporate actions processing, information management, reporting and investor services specialist support.

Stanbic IBTC Bank delivers an efficient custody solution underpinned by world class Investor Services Online technology, a system supported by highly skilled individuals. The bank is also a pioneer on other key capital market initiatives such as securities lending and derivatives clearing.

AUTOMATED PORT SOLUTION DESIGNED IN RESPONSE TO CLIENT NEEDS ELEVATES RECONCILIATION CAPACITY A reflection of the Bank’s commitment to its clients includes its exclusively structured automated ports solution.

Given its track record in managing similar engagements with other partners in the industry, the client reposed confidence in Stanbic IBTC’s cash management competencies, and the secured mandate required the Bank to ensure:  Provision of electronic collection options for terminal charges and demurrage.  Real-time online access and multi-bank reporting.  Ease of reconciliation.

Stanbic IBTC delivered by collaborating with ZEST, a fintech subsidiary of the bank, to deploy a variety of collection solutions while leveraging industry aggregators. The co-created solution would enable the port client’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integration, ensuring seamless reconciliation for the client as well as giving the port operator a consolidated view across multiple channels. Similarly, the solution was customised precisely to meet the client’s requirement of becoming the first port in the market to automate its operations and processes on an end-to-end basis.

As Stanbic IBTC Bank continues to enhance its product offerings, digital platform capabilities and customised solutions, it remains well-placed to expand its transaction banking business.

Validating its institutional achievements over the past year, The Digital Banker recognised Stanbic IBTC Bank as the “Best Bank for Trade Finance – Nigeria,” “Best Custodian Bank – Nigeria,” “Outstanding Digital Transformation by a Transaction/Wholesale Bank in Covid19” and “Best ERP Integration Initiative” at the recently concluded Global Transaction Banking Innovation Awards 2023 program.

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Efigence: The Power of UX Design Driven by Customer-Centric Approach Amidst the rapid and often disorienting evolution of technology, corporate leaders find themselves at a crossroads, as highlighted by a McKinsey study revealing that 85% are uncertain about how to keep pace with the unpredictable nature of tech advancement.

It is within this context of digital acceleration that Efigence has emerged as a bastion of progress and innovation.

Recently, it has been distinguished as the ‘Best Retail Banking Solutions Provider by a Vendor — Overall’ at the Global BankTech Awards 2023, organised by The Digital Banker. This honour reflects Efigence’s proven expertise in crafting cutting-edge banking customer experiences and managing robust digital transformations, showcasing it as the quintessential partner for businesses aiming to navigate and conquer the dynamic landscape of technological innovation.

“Efigence’s dedication to strategic vision, combined with their meticulous execution and a deep understanding of customer journey intricacies, has set a new benchmark in the industry. Their transformative effect on digital banking platforms, bringing about revolutionary user experiences while managing sensitive data with utmost integrity, was pivotal in their recognition as the foremost Retail Banking Solutions Provider,” says Nirav Patel, Managing Director of The Digital Banker.

The Efigence Edge in Digital Banking Transformation Efigence is not a newcomer to the area of digital innovation. It boasts a resolute approach, marked by curiosity and reliability, adeptly navigating the complex processes that engage hundreds in the journey towards transformation. This has not only propelled brands to the forefront of global tech standards but also made a significant impact across industries, often outpacing competitors.

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Their portfolio boasts collaborations with prominent banks like Alior Bank, BNP Paribas, mBank, NORDEA, Emirates NBD and notably, Credit Agricole Bank Polska, where their role was crucial in developing a mobile app designed to transform banking interaction and customer engagement.

Efigence’s transformative processes have garnered industry accolades and marked market recognition for brands under their guidance. Their clear strategic vision ensures that from C-suite executives to customer service representatives, every individual in an organisation is aligned with the goals of new technological deployments.

Working with Efigence offers many advantages, especially a strong tech boost that helps businesses get ahead of their competition.

A prime example of Efigence’s distinctive prowess is the development of the CA24 Mobile application for Credit Agricole Bank Polska.

The app reflects a significant leap from conventional banking apps, embodying a harmonious blend of innovation and user-centric design. It provides a robust, multifunctional digital banking environment, encouraging users to engage more frequently and meaningfully with their financial services provider.

Reinventing Systems for the Digital Age Beyond the boost in technological agility, Efigence reimagines and overhauls legacy systems. They create buffer systems and reactive modulesthat resonate with contemporary customer expectations, providing real-time experiences and readiness for the market demands of tomorrow.

Their design philosophy pivots around enhancing digital sales channels, sculpting interfaces, and customer journeys that resolve issues at crucial interactions. This intricate understanding of digital sales funnels has enabled banks to amplify their sales prowess significantly.

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Moreover, Efigence brings to the table anacute sensitivity to data management. In the intricate dance of boosting sales and managing delicate customer information, Efigence exhibits mastery. They ensure data presentation is not just aesthetically pleasing but also compliant with stringent regulations, integrating security layers right from the design inception.

A Gateway to Enhanced Trust and User Experience The relentless advance of technology necessitates that businesses, particularly in the banking sector, revitalise their user experience to conform to modern standards. Efigence’s strength lies in its capacity to orchestrate digital transformations that harmonise outdated systems with sophisticated user experiences seamlessly.

Partnering with specialised agencies like Efigence offers banks a formidable advantage, paving the path to heightened customer trust, industry recognition, and a bolstered digital sales framework.

As the figures reflect, with 582,000 active usersand growing for the CA24 Mobile application alone, Efigence’s impact is tangible. Their work with Credit Agricole Bank Polska serves as a testament to the remarkable outcomes that can be achieved when a bank dares to transcend its traditional boundaries and embrace the transformative guidance of a leader in digital innovation. For banks looking towards the horizon of the digital age, Efigence stands ready as the ideal partner to bridge the gap between legacy banking and the future of customer- centric financial services.

“The relentless advance of technology necessitatesthat businesses, particularly in the banking sector, revitalise their user experience to conform to modern standards.”

Connect with the Digital Evolution

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW ROEL LOUWHOFF

Chief Transformation, Technology & Operations Officer, Standard Chartered Bank

The real challenge is how you are going to deliver transformation, not if you can do it.”

TDB: Banks often struggle in their modernisation journey. How can institutional leadership help navigate complex transitions and inspire an organisational change in mindset to embrace innovation and unlock new growth?

RL: Compared to other sectors, banking is relatively late in understanding the need to link all transactions and activities to the client experience, this is particularly so for traditional banks. Traditional banks, having come from products, tend to be productoriented rather than client-oriented. Unlike newer FinTechs, more established businesses in financial services also face the ‘burden’ of legacy platforms, components and mainframes that can be over 50 years old - a key challenge many businesses often cite.

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To move forward, this is a mindset of ‘playing the victim’ which must be left behind. Instead, organisations need to work with what they have and continually innovate to achieve their goal. The real challenge is how you are going to deliver transformation, not if you can do it.

To navigate the complex transitions in this modernisation journey, institutional leadership in banking needs to bridge the gap of moving from ‘product’ to ‘client’ and working horizontally across specialisations and disciplines, instead of only or mostly vertically in individual silos down the organisation.

I have observed that many transformation journeys in businesses today are focused on digitalisation of the front-end, and less about simplifying technology, process, organisational structure end-to-end, or empowering people. Transformation is about bringing all these components together to create a modern, innovative culture and mindset.

Standard Chartered is at the forefront of banking innovation, and we continue to encourage a high-performance culture that fosters experimentation and continuous improvement. While setting the culture is important, it is even more important to

interlink innovation with business outcomes.

You can only get the best results out of innovation when you ensure it directly impacts the clients you serve.

TDB: The global banking landscape is being defined by wide-ranging digital transformation, increased competition from new market entrants & platforms and evolving customer behaviour How is Standard Chartered Bank (SC) adapting to this change and what role is the Transformation, Technology & Operations (TTO) team playing in embracing and adapting to this paradigm shift, while also fostering the development of new digital ecosystems?

RL: The pace of digitalisation is accelerating across the world, bringing to the forefront key questions around the balance between privacy, security, and the benefits of crossborder flow of data and innovation.

The main goal of TTO is ensuring Standard Chartered truly becomes a client-centric data-driven digital bank that is trusted and unafraid to innovate banking to meet the needs of the future. This means working on our processes, technology, data infrastructure and skills needed in the future to deliver a complete, efficient and enjoyable client experience.

Going digital in financial services is often perceived as the front-end interface with clients. But that is just one aspect of digitalisation, namely what clients see. If your end-to-end processes are not optimally aligned and fully digital, even a fantastic interface on the mobile phone will not deliver a swift and seamless customer journey.

Banks today focus predominantly on the front-end of being digital and often forget the back-end, thereby neglecting the total end-to-end process.

At TTO, we adopt a bold approach to transformation that continually empowers all our stakeholders to reimagine what banking should be today, and could be tomorrow, on a global scale – digital, secure, inclusive and personalised. Our four-pronged approach is:

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(i) Take a collaborative and client-centric view of innovation across all products and services to reduce friction and increase speed at which ideas convert into solutions,

(ii) Strive to set the industry standard for robust operational, cybersecurity and data practices through simplifying and standardising the core building blocks of our technology architecture,

(iii) everage the unique scale of our deep cross-border networks, in-market capabilities and partnerships, and

(iv) Build on the strength of our diverse employees to differentiate ourselves as an employer of choice and an inclusive, future-ready workforce.

We believe these strategies can help futureproof the Bank and ensure we remain innovative, sustainable and fit-for-purpose for years to come.

TDB: Banks often are working with layers of legacy infrastructure and multiple platforms.

Is there a more permanent fix to this predicament and how has SC addressed this challenge?

RL: A longer-term solution would be ensuring that existing infrastructure and platforms remain relevant for our business and clients. These systems should be continually reviewed, updated, and improved to ensure that the ever-evolving client needs are met – and this is achieved by utilising the right technology.

Technology sits at the heart of many solutions to our biggest challenges and those of our clients. By taking a collaborative and client-centric view of innovation across all our products and services, our data-driven approach empowers us to be more intentional for our clients, building customised solutions and experiences that deliver real value. This approach also helps negate unnecessary layers of legacy infrastructure and platforms.

To innovate at scale, both swiftly and securely, we must simplify and standardise the core building blocks of our technology architecture by balancing between resilience and agility as new technologies

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are onboarded and existing systems are maintained.

We have clear frameworks and oversight for the development of new technology and are implementing a safe open banking software development environment for innovation and experimentation with cutting edge technology to continually innovate and improve existing solutions with new technology.

TDB: In 2024, what key technologies such as Gen AI, blockchain, cloud computing and robotics etc. do you believe will become central in augmenting the Bank’s ability to deliver elevated customer experiences and enhanced operational efficiencies and why?

RL: Robotics, in the form of robotic process automation, and blockchain have been applied across banking activities for some time now, and we see continual, rapid growth in cloud computing.

AI has been a true disruptor across many industries with Gen AI having a mindblowing potential to impact businesses. The catalyst function of AI and LLMs are having a profound impact on digitalisation across the world and even more so on privacy.

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As these technologies are becoming mainstream, there is growing urgency to have conversations around the change and impact on the human environment. So in addition to elevating client experiences, a key challenge for banks is how to embed these technologies across operations and activities safely and securely without compromising client data and trust.

While the sophistication and adoption of emerging technology is rapidly growing, it also requires strong self-governance and a collaborative, cross-industry approach. At Standard Chartered, we are applying AI to deep internal data resources across client segments to provide personalised content and solutions on various touchpoints.

We regularly engage with regulators to understand the evolving regulatory landscape around emerging technologies and innovation. We also have a robust data governance framework to manage handling data and deploying innovation responsibly and maintain regular collaboration with public and private sector players to manage risks.

Altana Wealth: consistently outperforming through innovative and niche investment strategies As digital assets (cryptocurrencies, tokens and digital collectables) emerge as a viable investment class, one specialist fund manager, UK-based Altana Wealth, is proving its expertise in deploying innovative investment strategies with low correlation to public markets and other asset classes.

Indeed, its competitive advantage has been built on superior information analysis and a distinct investment style reinforced by applying niche strategies that generate alpha and are unique enough to be overlooked by peer managers. Altana Wealth demonstrates its commitment as a meaningful co-investor in its funds by aligning interests with investors.

ALTANA DIGITAL CURRENCY FUND ENABLES INVESTORS ACCESS TO ACTIVELY MANAGED DIGITAL CURRENCIES Importantly, Altana Wealth launched the first regulated European Digital Assets Fund in 2014.

The Altana Digital Currency Fund (ADCF) is managed

by Alistair Milne, a recognised industry expert and digital assets native. The Fund aims to take advantage of volatility and increase investor returns rather than passively benchmark. ADCF has returned 3,600% net since inception and has outperformed the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto index by 1000%.

Structured as an open-ended fund that invests in cryptocurrencies in proportion to their global market capitalisation, most of the fund’s value is currently derived from the price movement of Bitcoin and, to a lesser extent, Ethereum.

Moreover, given the observed high borrowing rates when increasing exposure above 100%, Altana’s leadership team, comprising Neil Panchen (CTO),

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Alistair Milne (CIO of ADCF) and Lee Robinson (Altana Founder and CIO), decided to investigate and study the lending market. This led to a systematic framework followed by direct lending with proprietary capital on the platform in 2016. After successfully testing the platform for one year, Altana launched Altana Specialty Finance (ASF) in January 2017 with Neil Panchen as Portfolio Manager.

ALTANA SPECIALTY FINANCE HAS DELIVERED SOLID RETURNS UNDER ALL MARKET CONDITIONS SINCE ITS INCEPTION. ASF, an Alternative Credit Fund that lends USD cash to digital asset traders, recorded its 83rd consecutive positive monthly return in November 2023. The fund has returned a 12.5% net annualised IRR with a 2.0% annualised volatility. It is the only regulated digital assets fund with a long track record, no down months, and a high Sharpe Ratio of 4.9. Indeed, its consistent double-digit returns in 2022, when most digital asset funds had material drawdowns, reflect its deep investment insight and portfolio management skills.

The investment strategy is uncorrelated to both traditional processes and digital asset strategies, so it sits well in both types of portfolios. It is systematically managed with discretionary inputs (80/20) by PM Neil Panchen, architect of the systematic lending platform, who was part of the team that built Deutsche Bank’s Global FX business and was responsible for Deutsche’s Global FX IT Trading platforms in 2008.

In addition, Altana leveraged its quantitative trading expertise to develop a proprietary statistical

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Source: EdgeFolio

algorithm that lends to digital asset traders 24/7, maximises the interest earned and minimises the risk on the loan portfolio. ASF secures its loans against the over-collateralised digital assets traders buy on exchange. Altana prudently undertakes a rigorous counterparty risk analysis and lends to digital asset traders in the ASF Fund on venues that meet this criterion.

Indeed, Altana Wealth has methodically orchestrated the launch of three digital asset funds that provide

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investors with diverse ways to take advantage of the digital currency markets by executing unique investment strategies.

Affirming its institutional achievements, particularly for its Altana Specialty Fund, The Digital Banker recognised Altana Wealth as “Best Asset/Fund Manager for Digital Assets in Western Europe” at the recently concluded Digital Assets Awards 2023.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW JOEL LANGE Executive Vice President and General Manager, Dow Jones Risk & Research

TDB: Financial crime remains an ongoing concern of risk managers across many jurisdictions. What are some key trends in financial crime that you are seeing, which merits closer attention and why?

JL: Advancements in technology and increased cross-border transactions have made the task of regulatory compliance even more demanding. The rise of digital transactions, global connectivity, and modern financial practices create new challenges that call for an enterprising approach to enhanced vigilance and adopting advanced strategies to effectively combat financial crime.

More than ever, companies today are beholden to escalating and ever-changing demands, and need to constantly adapt, improve, and update their processes and workflows to protect their businesses from risk.

Compliance teams play a key role in conducting traditional compliance checks as a good first line of defence against money laundering and terrorist financing. Negative news screening, for example, can quickly

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assess clients and prospects or monitor overseas business during onboarding (i.e.

Russian connections that place increased sanctions and compliance risks on businesses).

Singapore’s recent money laundering case, valued at S$2.8 billion in assets, highlighted the critical importance of negative news screening. It is also extremely important for companies to identify ultimate beneficial ownership as criminals tend to set up shell companies with complex corporate structures for money laundering and predicate crimes.

In India, companies are looking to fortify their businesses and are actively pursuing technological advancements in compliance solutions with the approaching FATF audit in November.

Hong Kong’s progressive approach to develop the virtual assets sector by aligning with regulatory principles such as KYC, AML/CTF rules or customer due diligence is seen as a step in the right direction when the city’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) became one of the first

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and few regulatory authorities to introduce a comprehensive regime regulating a wide range of virtual asset-related activities.

Against this backdrop, I anticipate that we’ll start to see more and more organisations increasingly embrace AI as a tool to combat financial crime and shape their risk management strategies.

TDB: The RiskCenter Advanced Screening and Monitoring (ASAM) solution augments capabilities of financial institutions in combatting financial crime and mitigating third-party risks.

How is ASAM differentiated from other AI based platforms that also seek to strengthen institutional AML efforts and ensure regulatory compliance?

JL: As compared to other AI-based platforms aimed at strengthening institutional AML efforts and ensuring regulatory compliance, ASAM stands out by going beyond simple name matching, resolving real-world identities in multiple scripts through breakthrough Natural Language Processing (NLP) and identity resolution technology.

The tool minimises false positives when matching against client records by considering observed attributes like age, gender, nationality, and other biographical details. Advanced machine learning extracts valuable insights from both structured and unstructured data sources, reducing processing time and enhancing accuracy.

ASAM’s versatility shines through its intuitive and flexible design, making it a universal solution suitable for implementation by a wide range of organisations, from small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) and startups to global banks and corporations. It offers quick deployment as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution with support for multiple APAC languages and script capabilities.

Additionally, it seamlessly integrates via an

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API into other platforms, enabling inclusion in broader automated workflows.

More importantly, ASAM brings together our best data assets, not just our proprietary structured risk data, but also our unstructured text from thousands of licensed news sources on the Factiva business intelligence platform, which provides an unrivalled selection of global news, data and information from 200 countries and 32 languages.

TDB: What is the significance of leveraging Ripjar’s machine learning technology in the development of ASAM and how is it uniquely contributing to efficiency in risk control?

JL: After an extensive review of technology on the market Dow Jones chose Ripjar for its unique ability to screen and monitor at volume against both structured and unstructured data. Leveraging Ripjar’s cutting-edge machine learning technology in the development of ASAM holds immense significance for enhancing efficiency in risk control. Ripjar’s Labyrinth Screening machine learning algorithms are a key asset in this regard, as they have the ability to process an extensive volume of media articles in over 20 languages every day. Their primary role is to discern and highlight the adverse media content that is relevant to your organisation’s risk assessment.

These machine learning data classifiers excel in extracting essential entities from articles and determining the significance of each entity in relation to the article’s risk profile.

The unique strength lies in the synergy between Ripjar’s top-tier technology and high-quality risk data. This synergy resolves the common dilemma faced by compliance teams, where they often have to choose between speed, quality, or coverage in their risk control efforts.

ASAM’s integration of cutting-edge machine learning techniques also empowers it to extract meaning and value from diverse structured and unstructured data sources.

This combination of advanced technology and high-quality data is a game-changer in risk control as it not only reduces the time required for comprehensive risk assessment but also significantly enhances the accuracy of the results.

TDB:

enerative AI is receiving considerable G attention particularly for fraud detection and risk modelling and although it has gained wider adoption, doubts remain as to its efficacy and reliability. How can this be addressed and is there a case for Generative AI’s broader use in financial services or should it be deployed more selectively?

source data, necessitating a strong focus on the need for data quality assurance and the implementation of mechanisms to identify and rectify biases.

Ultimately, the decision regarding the broader deployment or selective use of generative AI in financial services lies in the industry’s ability to effectively address these concerns. Here at Dow Jones, we believe that striking a balance between innovation and risk management is important in fully realising the potential of generative AI, especially within the financial sector.

JL: Since the emergence of ChatGPT, the transformative power of generative AI has garnered significant attention in the financial services sector, particularly when it comes to fraud detection and risk modelling.

However, in such a highly regulated sector, governments and organisations still have lingering doubts regarding its reliability – which calls for a cautious approach to its integration.

To tackle these concerns effectively, prioritising transparency and explainability is crucial. Generative AI models often operate as opaque “black boxes”, highlighting the need for methods that provide users with insights into their decision-making processes. Therefore, organisations operating in the sector should allocate resources to research aimed at enhancing the interpretability of these models.

Additionally, we need to ensure data quality and mitigate biases when using generative AI. The reliability of the technology hinges on the quality of its

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Orchestrating Financial Excellence: FAB’s Transformative Approach to Banking Solutions First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) holds a significant position in the arena of modern banking. The bank’s achievements at the Middle East & Africa Innovation Awards 2023, organised by The Digital Banker, serve as a testament to its industry leadership. FAB was recognised across multiple categories, including Best Bank for Cash Management, Best Bank for Payments & Collections, and Best Bank for Transaction Banking Services, both within the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the wider Middle East region. Further solidifying its position as an innovation pioneer, FAB garnered accolades for the Best Blockchain Initiative and Best Virtual Account Initiative.

FAB’s impact on banking innovation in the UAE is undeniable. As the country’s leading bank and the finance and trade gateway to the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA), FAB has consistently shown strategic evolution and forward-thinking, positioning itself as a standout in the sector.

Gautam Dutta, Managing Director & Head of GTB Cash Management Product Innovation at FAB, says: “FAB’s dedication to revolutionising cash management and pioneering initiatives like the Virtual Account underscores our unwavering commitment to addressing genuine challenges in the banking sector. Recognition from The Digital Banker not only affirms our achievements but also drives

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us to continually reach new standards of banking innovation in the Middle East and beyond.”

The financial industry is undergoing a profound transformation driven by technological advancements and evolving customer expectations.

FAB is at the forefront of this transformation, recognising and embracing following certain key trends such as open finance, ISO 20022, payments tokenisation, and APIs, which are shaping the future of finance: Open finance has potential to revolutionise the financial sector by enabling secure data sharing, and has captured FAB’s attention. This openness

empowers new companies to enter the market, challenging traditional banks and leading to the development of more innovative financial products and services for both consumers and businesses.

ISO 20022, a new global messaging standard for cross-border payments, will bring in the benefits of convenience, efficiency, automation, compliance checks through rich and structured message formats paving the way for cross border transactions to be faster, cheaper, and more transparent.

FAB recognises the potential of this standard to streamline cross-border payments, a cornerstone of global trade and economic activity.

Payments tokenisation promises to redefine value transfer by lowering costs, bringing transparency and broadening access in a secured, scalable, programmable and interoperable manner. With enhanced cryptography, tokensiation of money and real world assets by creating a digital representation in a ledger will usher in the new era of monetary system and unlock multiple benefits.

APIs are a set of rules that define how two pieces of software can communicate with each other and revolutionise the way businesses and consumers interact with financial services. FAB acknowledges the transformative potential of APIs and is actively incorporating them into its operations to deliver seamless and convenient financial experiences.

STRATEGISING FINANCIAL EXCELLENCE: FAB’S TREASURY ADVISORY SERVICES FAB’s commitment to financial innovation and excellence is deeply ingrained in its pioneering Treasury Advisory team within its Global Transaction Banking (GTB) unit. This initiative, a first among GCC banks, and provides expert treasury consultancy advice to both existing and potential FAB clients.

Services include helping corporates assess their treasury needs, sharing global best practices, designing bespoke treasury frameworks, and structuring solutions in sync with current and future group policies and procedures. It works meticulously with corporates to develop high-level implementation plans, define robust programme governance models, and refine policies and procedures post-implementation, ensuring seamless and successful project delivery.

The Treasury Advisory team’s service portfolio has expanded with the introduction of FAB-TMS, a cutting-edge white label Treasury Management System (TMS), offered as a Software as a Service

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(SaaS) solution. It allows FAB clients to manage their treasury functions efficiently, benefiting from expedited implementation at reduced costs. The team provides ongoing support, eliminating the need for clients to invest in developing their own support infrastructure.

REVOLUTIONISING TRANSACTIONS: FAB’S VIRTUAL ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT – API FAB’s suite of cash management solutions are meticulously designed to help clients maximise efficiency, gain control over their cash flows and optimise their working capital. Driven by a mission to deliver innovative solutions, FAB is leveraging the latest technology to provide seamless end-toend integration between corporates and its banking services.

With its NextGen Virtual Accounts solutions, FAB has introduced simplified account structures that empower clients to create, transact and manage their own virtual accounts through an online portal.

Clients can also undertake end-to-end collections on behalf of (COBO) and payments on behalf of (POBO) capabilities, assisting them with their complex centralised treasury or in-house banking needs through use of virtual accounts.

This comprehensive solution caters to a diverse range of customer groups and industries, including Stored Value Facilities (SVF), which is particularly significant in light of recent SVF legislation, With its API capabilities, the Virtual Account API allows providers to receive real time notifications of any bank transfer ‘top-up’ performed by the wallet user, ensuring real-time visibility into transaction activities.

FAB has also made a paradigm shift through combining both automated direct debits and virtual accounts, in providing solutions to the real estate sector. This has led to an automated cash collection solution that reduces time and eliminates paperbased processes. Such innovative solutions support FAB’s commitment to its ESG agenda.

CASE STUDY: GLOBAL OIL COMPANY’S IN-HOUSE BANK ROLLOUT FAB’s collaboration with a global oil company to centralise payments and collections for over 700 entities within the group stands as a testament to its deep capabilities. FAB’s Treasury Advisory team

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played an instrumental role in designing the client’s treasury operations unit and constructing an inhouse bank structure. This multifaceted programme was delivered in phases, allowing the Group to benefit from operational efficiencies and economies of scale while working towards the end goal of establishing an in-house bank.

By leveraging FAB’s award-winning interoperable virtual accounts and liquidity management products, a holistic solution tailored to the client’s specific needs was created. The benefits of this solution included real-time visibility on cash balances and transactional activities, a robust investment policy, a standardised process across all legal entities, and optimal capital structure and utilisation of own funds to meet subsidiaries’ cash shortfall.

CONCLUSION FAB’s commitment to innovation is driven by a customer-centric approach, emphasizing the delivery of unparalleled banking solutions that meet the evolving needs of its clients. FAB’s impact extends beyond individual clients, as it actively contributes to shaping the financial landscape of the region.

By setting benchmarks in banking excellence and pioneering new technologies, FAB is playing a pivotal role in driving the region’s financial sector forward.

The successful implementation of the in-house bank solution for the global oil company exemplifies FAB’s commitment to providing bespoke, nimble and effective solutions, further solidifying its position as a leading financial institution in the Middle East.

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In the context of contemporary banking solutions in the UAE, the considerable impact of FAB is indisputable. As the nation’s premier bank, FAB has consistently demonstrated strategic evolution and forwardthinking, positioning itself as a notable entity in the banking sector.”

Gautam Dutta Managing Director & Head of GTB Cash Management Product Innovation

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